17 - The Purpose: Am I Following Trusting the Strategy of Envelopment to Resist the Cosmos? (Continued)

© Charles A. Clough 2014
Charles A. Clough
1 John Series

Lesson 17 – The Purpose: Am I Following Trusting the Strategy of Envelopment to Resist the Cosmos? (Continued)

02 Feb 2014
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

… 1 John 2:15–17 on the cosmos. Remember we’re in that section of 1 John that deals with resisting the world system and the conflict that we have and so it’s part of a larger section that we’ve been working with. Today we’re going to go down at more of the microscope level and look at verses 15, 16, and 17. If you’ll turn there and follow as I read; and we’ll get started.

^NKJ 1 John 2:15, “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.

¹⁶ “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.

 ¹⁷ “And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.”

(Opening prayer)

I still have on the screen [Slide 3] the quotation from Dr. Chafer’s Systematic Theology because I think he does a very good job in talking about the Greek word translated cosmos here. It’s a word for order. We have to be careful about this particular word because cosmos does mean order, not chaos. It means the opposite of chaos.

Of course, our Doctrine of Creation says that we do live in a cosmos. We do live in an orderly environment. We don’t live in a chaotic environment. That’s the fantasy of neo-Darwinism. We live in an intelligently designed environment. So in our reaction we look at this verse and the way he uses cosmos. We want to qualify what’s happening here.

What John was addressing when he’s using the noun cosmos, he’s addressing an ethical quality that has come into the Creation at the Fall. We know that evil causes chaos. So what does he mean by using cosmos in the sense of describing evil?

I think the best way for us to think about this is there’s a malicious and brilliant evil system. The system of evil has to be systematic even though it causes disorder. Remember, Satan cannot originate things. What he does, he perverts things; but he can’t totally pervert things because it wouldn’t be attractive to us.

No one likes chaos, so you can’t have total chaos. You have to have some sort of evil that is so close to God’s design that it’s deceptive. That’s the only way deception can work. We’ve gone through evil; and we’ve said that you can think of four events in Scripture, at least four events, that show insight into the nature of evil.

Of course, one of them is the Garden of Eden. We talked about that last time. The second one is the Tower of Babel, where you have society-wide evil. Now we’re not just talking about a couple. We’re not talking about an individual. We are talking about a world culture. The Tower of Babel kind of evil is with us and is becoming stronger in the cry for global governance. This was the cry at Babel. It was the first U. N. building basically, the Tower of Babel. So all the other attempts—Fascism, Nazism, Sharia, and so forth—are attempts to bring order, but order on an evil agenda.

Then we have the ancient theocracy of Israel. For 800 years God ran a nation. He was the legislative powers over ancient Israel in that God designed laws and policies. There we have an 800-year experiment. What would it be like if God controlled say the United States or God controlled Maryland? What would be the result? The answer that we’re getting from those 800 years of experimentation is it’d be a failure.

You say, “Well, how could it be a failure if God were the governor?”

Well, He was the governor in Israel. Look at 800 years’ experience. Was Israel a success or was it a failure? Ultimately it failed. Now it was a success in the larger sense because it set in motion various things that God is going to use to bring history to a culmination; but that’s 800 sobering years of data—public data, historically visible data—that shows failure. Now it’s not God that’s failing here. It’s us. It’s depraved man that’s failing. He’s failing as individuals. He’s failing as corporateness.

Then, of course, I mentioned last time the fourth case that we can show is that when God incarnated Himself and walked around the planet, what was the reaction? Kill Him! We’d get the same reaction today. We haven’t changed. So we left it on a pessimistic note last time. That is, well does that mean that God’s failing? It’s not meaning that God is failing.

It means—and the reason why I kept emphasizing those four things is they’re easy to picture in your mind without getting into all kinds of detailed theology. Those are four pictures that you can review in the imagination of your mind to get an idea of how powerful evil is. Evil is all dominating. The picture we need as Christians is to see that evil is so powerful, so well organized, so intelligent that we would be defeated were it not for God’s grace and our reliance upon His grace.

The idea that we, separated from God’s grace, can fight evil is a farce. We will be destroyed in trying to fight evil in any other way than what the Bible tells us—to rely completely upon His operating assets. That’s why the Scriptures are so important when they address us with the imperatives in the Epistles—do this and so forth.

They tell us:

^NKJ 1 Peter 5:7, “casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.”

That’s not just a psychological platitude. That is instruction from the Word of God.

I read a recently written book that is in our church library. I found this last week down sitting in the library. I had seen this book reviewed. It’s by David Kupelian. David is a journalist. He’s the editor of the Whistleblower Magazine, which is a very thoroughly researched magazine, conservative magazine. David is an Armenian. Now I didn’t say Arminian theologian but Armenian people who lived east of Turkey. David’s family was a victim of the great genocides when Turkey went in and destroyed the Armenians, tortured them, killed them, and so forth. Hitler killed. We’re always referring to the Jewish genocide; but the 20^th century started with a tremendous genocide against the Armenians. These people have never forgotten it. The Turks get all upset if you mention the massacre of what they did to the Armenians. Well, sorry. That’s history. Anyway he’s very sensitive to evil. In this book it’s an interesting title, How Evil Works. It’s his exposition of our society looking at this cosmos idea of evil.

Now in John he separates in 1 John 2:16. There are three things about evil and three topics that John uses. If you look at the first one, it’s the flesh [Slide 4]. So we want to think about the lust of the flesh. What is the lust of the flesh? Let’s think about how our bodies, our physical bodies today, differ from the physical bodies of Adam and Eve before they fell. Anybody have ideas about that? What are some characteristics our bodies have that were utterly foreign to Adam and Eve as they were created?

(Comment)

All right. Women have pain in childbirth. Amplified, we have pain. Why do we have pain? They did not have pain in their bodies. Sickness, illness, and death. Our bodies are a very elegantly designed machine. The fact that they still function as well as they do in spite of the Fall is an amazing thing. After the Fall for over 1,000 years what was the average life span? Anybody know? If we take them as normative, we’re talking nine centuries.

What would it be like if we lived nine centuries? I mean think about if you wanted to know something about history. You could ask your grandmother and they would have known about the Roman Empire and could have told you what the Caesars looked like because they saw them. Now what’s happened this side of the Flood to drop longevity from 900 years to 70 and 80 years? That’s a 90 percent drop. So our bodies today are woeful and very impotent compared to the tremendous high health of even the antediluvians who lived this side of the Fall and certainly our bodies are much unlike that of Adam and Eve prior to the Fall.

But there is one passage in Scripture, of course we talk now in the last few minutes Romans 8, groaning and travailing and so on. But there’s a passage in Scripture that takes a picture of our depraved bodies, our decaying bodies, and connects it with evil.

Turn to Ephesians 2. When John talks about the lust of the flesh, he’s talking about some deeper stuff than what it first appears. Before we read Ephesians 2 and I’ll ask someone to read Ephesians 2:1–3.

Before we read these three verses, let’s think about something else. One of the problems that we face with our flesh, the lust of the flesh, is our bodies have charged full of a very complicated chemical system—hormones. We are subject to all kinds of addictions.

Now let’s think about a drug. Why is it that certain drugs cause addiction? And, what is addiction? Certainly that is an example of the lust of the flesh. Once a person is addicted to a chemical, there’s a lusting for it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be addictive, right?

What causes the process? Briefly it’s this. We take some sort of chemical, drug, or whatever, and it causes chemical changes in our brain that are very pleasurable. They give serotonin and it goes to town. We have an actual chemical thing that happens inside our heads that is pleasurable. We seek that which causes the pleasure. It’s an easy form of pleasure because it doesn’t require much work. All you have to do is take the drug. So it’s a lazy way of getting pleasure to start with.

But the problem comes this way and addictions are classically like this. You can take say one gram of the drug and get pleasure. The problem is after our brains and our bodies get used to that reaction, it takes 1.5 grams to produce the same level of pleasure. Then our bodies get used to that and then it takes 2 grams of that to [have the same amount of] pleasure. That’s the whole problem of addiction.

Now the whole process of becoming addicted to a drug is the fact that a choice has been made. Was the choice forced upon us? Not really. Addicts will swear that they can’t help this. Apart from Jesus Christ that’s probably true. Part of regeneration is that at regeneration something new is created inside us that wasn’t there before.

It becomes possible then to separate the regenerate nature from the sin nature; and it requires care. That’s what John is talking about here—lust of the flesh—to spot what is coming off the flesh as that which is not determinative. I have a choice. Now it may be hard; but if I’m focusing on the Lord Jesus Christ, I am thinking, orienting to Him so I control the fact. I separate Him from this lust of the flesh. That’s the separation thing; and that’s hard to do because sometimes you need to do it very quickly. It’s hard to do that particularly if you are subject to some sort of addiction.

Let’s turn now. We’ve got another problem now besides the hormonal addiction and lust of the flesh. Let’s look at Ephesians 2. Would someone like to read Ephesians 2:1–3?

^NKJ Ephesians 2:1, “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,

² “in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,

³ “among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”

These three verses are shocking. They are a shocking depiction of reality—a reality that no psychiatrist would buy into – at least no naturalistic psychiatrist would buy into this. But do you see as you particularly read verse 2—what is in verse 2 that suggests something else besides the flesh is at work; but that works through the flesh? Evil as a spiritual entity. And notice how he phrases it. He says:

“walked according to the course of this world”

In other words as unbelievers we were daily synchronized to the course of this world. What is the course of this world? What’s the next clause? Look at the clauses here—or the phrases. They’re not clauses. Phrases don’t have a subject. The course of this world, comma, now what?

“according to the prince of the power of the air”

Can it be any clearer? Who sets the course of the cosmos, ethically? Remember God sets the cosmos up by His design. But who has come into the cosmos as the result of the Fall and now ethically dominates it? The prince of the power of the air. Then what does this qualify? After he says the prince of the power of the air, what’s the next … and this one is a whole clause—what’s this one say? Look at the verb tenses. The spirit who now—present tense—this is not the boogey man from Genesis here.

“the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,”

And then so we don’t get fat headed and self-righteous:

³ “among whom also we all”

Every one of us …

“once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”

This is a powerful depiction of our nature. Yes.

(Question)

What Joel is bringing up is there is a parallel to addiction here. Instead of addicted to a chemical, it’s being addicted to an idea—ideas. When you see the word “spirit” in the Bible, you really have to be careful because if you look at the word spirit you can think of the word spirit as something spooky, some mystical thing. But in Proverbs 1, which is wisdom literature, lady wisdom comes out and she says:

^NKJ Proverbs 1:23, “… I will pour out my spirit on you;”

Then it’s parallel poetry.

“I will make my words known to you.”

If that’s parallel poetry, what is she saying? I communicate my spirit by communicating my ideas into your mind. That’s how spirit is communicated. So that’s why the Bible is so important.

We live in a hostile environment. When John is in this passage (to come back to 1 John 2 when John is in this passage), that’s what he is talking about resisting. So that’s why he starts out not with evil things. He starts out your children, little children in your relationship and fellowship with the Lord, little children, you’re dependent on your daddy to cleanse you from sin.

Then he says, “Believers, you’re also like fathers in the sense you have a sense of history because you know Him who is from the beginning. And then you also have fellowship with the Father as young men, warriors, who have overcome the wicked one.”

How have we overcome the wicked one? The fact that we chose to trust in Jesus Christ from outside the evil cosmos. We’ve rebelled against the evil cosmos at the point we have trusted in Jesus Christ.

To give another insight into this, David Kupelian in this book I was mentioning, How Evil Works, he has this section about how we tend to project blame and guilt onto other people. He says:

Projecting blame and guilt onto other people is a core survival strategy for the dark side of human nature. If we want to avoid taking responsibility for our own sins, we find a scapegoat. On the world stage, the Nazis blamed the Jews. The Turks blamed the Armenians. The Japanese blamed the Chinese. But in our own lives with infinite variations most of us tend to play the same game, blaming each other for our problems.

You can see this even in the local church. That’s the way evil works. But then he comes in and I think this is a very insightful passage in this book. He says:

Projecting our own inner darkness onto others is such a successful technique to avoid facing ourselves that we’ve even figured out how to turn inanimate objects into scapegoats. Doesn’t this seem odd? Guns are without question indispensable for restraining evil intentions of criminals and tyrants. Indeed, exhaustive research proves more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens result in less crime. Yet millions of us nevertheless consider guns almost inherently evil and well-funded organizations are dedicated to banning them. But the evil isn’t in the gun. It’s in us. Do we dare examine the disturbing truth behind this common phenomenon?

He says, be careful here, because he’s going to lead us on a little tour.

Let’s focus on the strange thoughts and feelings never spoken, never acknowledged to anyone else, not even to ourselves that arise from the depths of many of us in the presence of a loaded firearm sitting there on the table.

“Why don’t you pick up the gun and blow your brains out?”

“You could kill a whole lot of people with that gun.”

“Why not shoot her right now; that would shut her up.”

That’s right. Dark thoughts and impulses too horrible to dwell upon or even acknowledge occur to many of us at the mere sight of a firearm or a naked knife. When we see the weapon, we sense the presence of evil, so naturally we assume the gun is the source when actually the gun’s close proximity caused our own buried, angry, violent tendency to surface in a split second.

Then he takes other examples of this, which I thought was interesting. He says:

Let’s examine this admittedly spooky phenomenon a little more closely. Have you ever stood close to the edge of a cliff or out on the balcony of a tall building? Did you notice some force almost seemed to want to pull you over the edge? Most of us have experienced something like this, the momentary loss of balance, an unexplainable fear, some mysterious pull toward the edge. We have a moment of disorientation and fear and then we pull back to safety. In this life the malevolent intelligence we call evil is constantly scanning each of us for opportunities to tempt or even destroy us. The Bible has a famous verse—“be sober, be vigilant because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walks about seeking whom he may devour” and critical moments of indescribable evil seize the opportunity to give a mental shove.

Insightful into how close to the cosmos this structured evil is.

Going back to 1 John 2. You see this is why John tells us to love not the world because if we love the world in a blind sense we don’t have any sense of the difference between the moral embodiment and motives, the agenda that goes on all around us and what the Lord wants us to do. He’s alerting us to that battle. So, we’ve seen this. This is the lust of the flesh.

So, we come to a common verse that we have here. This is why this verse that can be read at 60 miles an hour and become quite trite and trivial. But if you think about it—this is Paul, Galatians 5—you notice John says it says either love the world or love the Father—one or the other, not three things, not five things, only two things. Here’s the same thing in Paul.

^NKJ Galatians 5:16, “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

¹⁷ “For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.”

That’s the struggle Paul does in Romans 7. This is the reality of the hostile environment in which we live. Self-evaluation technique here for lust of the flesh would be, am I responding to an inner feeling in order to violate God’s design? Do I have an inner feeling and I’m responding to this inner feeling; but I’m not catching it realizing that if I respond to this thing, I deny God’s order—I’ve denied God’s created order. It can be done quick, in a split second, or it can be slow. But the battle is in the head. It’s going on all the time.

All right, let’s go to the next one. What’s the second one that John warns us about? We talked about the lust of the flesh. Now it is the lust of the eyes [Slide 5]. Of course, the best example of that we’ll turn to in a moment; but remember what Eve said about the fruit? What did she say?

“It looks good.”

Our aesthetics or looking at the things that are beautiful—is that inherently evil? No. Think of the beauty that God has designed in His Creation. You can go a thousand meters into the ocean at the depths of dark black, no light, and yet when you bring light down to that depth of the water; you see the brilliant designs of the fish.

I’ve often wondered why did God spend all of this time painting these beautiful colors in all these fish and there’s no light to see them. We can’t enjoy them. Think of all the birds—of all the different colors and designs of them. God is an artist. He has an effulgence. I’ve never seen a theologian list that as a divine attribute, but I think it is one. God is an artist and part of His character is an effulgence of spilling beauty all over the place. The problem here is that we live with an intelligent evil that also knows aesthetics and can use aesthetics seductively.

So let’s turn to Matthew 5. Here’s the classic passage on the lust of the eyes, the Sermon on the Mount. There is a little feature in Jesus’ comment here. We have to understand the Pharisees for why he says the kinds of things he says in this passage—a well-known passage. Matthew 5:27.

You notice he begins:

^NKJ Matthew 5:27, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

²⁸ “ ‘But I say to you …’ ”

First is an act. It’s behavior. Everything else in this verse isn’t talking about behavior. He’s talking about the lust of the eyes. So Jesus is separating behavior, which by the way, law, civil law, can only restrain behavior. Civil law cannot restrain mental attitude sins.

So the question that Jesus is raising to the Pharisees is, “You guys, you’ve turned the whole Mosaic Law Code into just a civil law code.” But when you turn the whole spirit behind the Ten Commandments and you say I’m following the Ten Commandments but what you’ve done is you’ve reduced the Ten Commandments content to civil law—automatically confined the Ten Commandments to behavior only and not mental attitudes that lead to that behavior. That’s the impotence by the way of civil law. That’s the fallacy that you see today with regulations.

I saw a businessman the other day saying, “In the last year the Federal Government has created 2,800 regulations for my business. I can’t even keep up with it. So if you’re wondering why I’m not hiring anybody I haven’t got time because now I have 2,800 more regulations that I have to deal with. You wonder why I don’t create and expand my business and create jobs. Duh…. Stop regulating it.”

But you see a society of non-Christians has to resort to civil law because they have no tool to contain mental attitude sins. So they try to contain mental attitude sins by piling one regulation up on top of another regulation up on top of another regulation on top of another regulation, desperately trying to stop bad behavior. But, they’re not targeting the source of the behavior. So let’s look at what Jesus does here.

^NKJ Matthew 5:27, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

²⁸ “But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

²⁹  “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

³⁰ "“And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”

What Jesus is getting at there is the mental attitude that leads to this. Here’s what happened. The Ten Commandments, if you think about all Ten Commandments, Jesus is talking about commandment #7 (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), commandment #8 (“Thou shalt not steal”), commandment #9 (“Thou shall not commit perjury”) Ahh, but what’s the tenth commandment?

Remember the tenth commandment is the one commandment Paul said, “That when I read the tenth commandment, that’s when I realized my sin—the depth of my sin;” because what does the tenth commandment address that the other commandments don’t appear to address? Anybody know the tenth commandment?

“Thou shall not covet.”

Is that a behavior? No, it’s a mental attitude sin, isn’t it? Coveting, envying. By the way that’s one of the reasons why socialism—socialism violates the 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th commandments. Socialism practices envy.

There was an interview I was telling Jik last night I saw this multi-millionaire Canadian who had moved from Ottawa, Ontario, which is kind of very socialist down to Boston, Massachusetts a number of years ago. He is a very successful businessman. He was on a television program recently and this liberal journalist was trying to embarrass him as a businessman. They always try to embarrass any successful businessman. So she plucked out this report that said one percent of the people own all this 30 percent or something of the property in the United States.

She expected him to cower and he smiled and said, “That’s a wonderful report. It shows you what effort can accomplish.”

Then he went on to say, “Look in 1900, 70% of the world’s population was in poverty. Right now only 17% of the people are in poverty. That’s thank you to capitalism.”

Then he went on to point out that in athletics—are we worried about the fact that we have an inequality of athletic ability? Did you ever hear of a team saying that you have to have an equal level of ability on all our players? Did you ever have a team like that? Have successful teams ever become successful by allowing mediocrity on everybody on the team?

In athletics what do we do? We hold up the superior person, not to envy, but to do what? To imitate. We hold up the successful person. They’re the ones I want to be like. That’s how you get out of poverty. You don’t get out by whining about it because somebody else makes more money than you do. Do what they do and you can make money like they do.

See that’s the issue of envy. It’s all over our culture today. Every single day you see politicians going after … “You’ve got to envy. The wealthy people are the bad people. They’re evil people.” No, they’re not. They work hard—as long as they’re not stealing it. They’re working hard. They earned it. What’s your problem?

So here is the tenth commandment, “thou shall not covet”. That’s what Jesus is pointing out.

He’s saying, “Pharisees, you took the seventh commandment and you isolated it from the tenth commandment. How about putting them together?”

That’s what this passage is doing because in the tenth commandment when you read it—“thou shall not covet somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s girl friend” and so on. Isn’t that what Jesus is saying here?

All He is doing is taking the tenth commandment and applying it to the seventh commandment. What is so hard about this? And yet here we have a whole culture in Israel, the Pharisaic culture, that picks a little minutia up and pick another one up. It’s like the healthcare bill, 2,500 pages that nobody reads. How can you vote on it? So, this is what Jesus had to deal with in this passage.

The lust of the eyes is one of these things that we have to watch and the mental attitude sins and the self-evaluation process that we have on the outline here is: am I responding to some externally attractive object? It’s a little different than the lust of the flesh. The lust of the eyes is where I’m being seduced by my own desires for aesthetics. I mean that’s God given. God wants us to be pleased aesthetically; but He doesn’t want us to be seduced with an aesthetic. So that’s the battle we face there.

Now the last one—what’s the last one that John talks about, the third area here? The pride of life [Slide 6]. The pride of life is a—the best way of looking at this, look up the Greek word for pride. It’s alazoneia. It occurs in James 4:16 and in the interest of time let me read this to you and listen to how James uses this word in James 4. He addresses businesspeople, by the way.

^NKJ James 4:13, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit;’ ”

Is that a business plan? Sure, it’s a business plan. James is not against business plans, but he’s saying there is a certain mental attitude that goes on. So he says:

^NKJ James 4:13, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’;

^NKJ James 4:14, “whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow.”

Ooo. Do you have that plugged into your business plan? You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.

^NKJ James 4:15, “Instead you ought to say,”

Now James is not knocking the business plan. All he’s saying is you’ve got to protect your business plan, the way you think, the way you schedule. He says you’ve got to plan it this way. So this is what he says:

^NKJ James 4:15, “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.’ ”

If the Lord wills, the plan will come to pass. What happens mentally? What’s the mental process that you’re going through here? How would you describe James trying to get us straightened out in our heads about planning? If we preface the plan with “if the Lord wills” what have we automatically done? What do you sense or feel?

If you think of a plan that you have and you consciously say to yourself, “If the Lord wills we’ll do this, this, and this …” Excuse me. You’re depending on God. Yeah. It’s a conscious mental act that you go through. See how the Word of God is showing us how to think and how to respond in these life situations?

We need to drill in how to think and how to respond because it’s like an athletic game. The play is too fast. You’ve got to practice before the game because you have to get your responses quick. That’s what John is trying to do here. We’re living in a hostile brilliantly designed, brilliantly evil environment. We have to practice on how we’re responding mentally day after day after day.

So James says after you say if—but now if you don’t do this here’s what James says:

^NKJ James 4:16, “But now you boast in your arrogance.”

There’s the Greek word that John uses. So John says the pride of life. He means the arrogance of life. The word life here isn’t zoe. It’s the word bios and bios is the word that can be natural like; but it’s also used for possessions, things.

So the pride of life here and here is self-evaluation #3 coming up. I think it’s on your outline. “Am I so immersed in my plans for the details of life that I have forgotten my creature status—that I brought nothing into this world and I’m going to take nothing out?”

So hopefully we’ve gone through those three areas—lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. What we’re trying to do is get some self-evaluation mental tools so we can meet the seductive nature that we’re involved with. Evil has total access to our minds as long as we’re in our mortal bodies.

We conclude with this famous verse from Romans 12. What does it say? [Slide 7]

^NKJ Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Folks, the renewing of our mind doesn’t happen by autopilot. The renewing of our mind happens just as an athlete practices. He practices reviewing the string of thought that’s going through my brain. Am I listening to the wrong orchestra here or am I getting the Word of God?

Hopefully this has been helpful. We’ll go on next time. We’ll have time for Q&A by the way. I had to go through this fast today and we didn’t have a lot of Q&A, but next week we will. We’ll head into the third area of resistance and this involves false teaching.

(Closing prayer)