2 Timothy 2:22
“Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.”
Let me reword the Apostle’s warning to his beloved Timothy “sprint as fast as you can to get away from the passionate thirsts of your immature self”—like a gazelle from the jaws of the lion. It turns out your own unchanneled passions are the predatory lion destroying lives. We each share the nature of both animals and of God. The animal nature is built to survive, consume, and procreate—a dangerous cocktail when mixed with the complex range of human emotions. But the animal instinct must be domesticated by our “God nature”—the spirit. Your worldview plays a strategic role in informing how to handle the basic instincts of human passion.
The Christian worldview says, the animal nature isn’t evil necessarily, it just needs channeled by the God-nature. Here are the filters we press our instincts through so that it can produce moral order: RIGHTEOUSNESS. FAITH. LOVE. PEACE.
Righteousness
Have you ever helped a child draw a connect-the-dot picture? If you don’t follow the right order you can’t tell what the picture is intended to depict. When you follow the lines correctly a resemblance emerges. The same is true of life. When we follow God’s laws, our lives begin to take the shape of God’s character. We can see within ourselves and within each other the resemblance of God’s goodness, compassion, and truthfulness. As with connect-the-dots, we can’t create our own order and expect it to turn out correctly. There’s a right way to do it; “righteousness” is when our lives take the right shape.
Faith
As we learned in these last two sermons, we have a choice to live as if the universe is empty and lacking in meaning, purpose, and moral regulations. Or we can choose to order our lives around the reality of the unseen “Mind” that designed, engineered, authored, and judges all that we see. Faith isn’t believing without evidence. Faith is believing in, and living according to, the presence of immaterial "Mind" because of sufficient evidence. It’s more than an intellectual exercise. It’s a way of life built on the confidence that God’s truths are even more real than our sciences.
Love
The “Mind” that we call God has revealed himself as a Father, a Father to be loved and enjoyed. He is perfect self-sacrificing love, and he wants his children to grow up to love like him. We know that self-sacrificing love is the highest ethic around the globe. There is no reason to believe that Darwin’s theory that says survive at all cost is capable of producing a global ethic that says love is the highest good? God has given us a moral compass to point the way back to him. Let us grow up and love like God, instead of devolve into selfish primates who live for their own benefit. Man is ever evolving into the thing we most admire. Will we admire God and his perfect love? Or will we admire ourselves and our man-centric cultures of desire and pleasure?
Peace
If you’ve ever listened to a symphony you know that there are moments of discord that fill the music with tension and strife. Almost always the music resolves in a harmonious chord that resonates with peace. As in music, so in life. A life unresolved is full of discord and strife. It is restless, listless and stirring up trouble. The life that is in harmony with it’s Creator finds peace, and lives in harmony with the other creatures harmonizing with their Creator. The entire symphony works in majestic concert together because there is an orchestrator. Jesus is like the conductor leading us into that symphonic unity; he is called the Prince of Peace.
When a life is lived in righteousness, faith, and love it resolves in peace. For that reason, and with my final words I encourage you with a quote from the disciple Peter who was closest to the Jesus. He said, “seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:11).
Tags: love, faith, righteousness, peace, evil desires
