The Cravings of the Flesh | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Here at Theocast, we aim to herald the message of Jesus and the rest that is ours in Him, and we also encourage the saints to show compassion to one another because of Christ in the gospel.

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But that does not mean for one second that we are soft -peddling sin. In fact, sin is far worse, and it's a much bigger deal than many of us think that it is.

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We are all born with lusts and cravings and passions and desires that are wrong.

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And John and I are going to have a conversation about that today. There's all kinds of implications for life in the church, including accountability, which is where John and I will go in the

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Members Podcast area. We hope this is clarifying and helpful to you. Stay tuned. A simple way for you to help support

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are

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John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself,

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. John, brother, we have met to podcast.

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And I think we're going to have a really good and helpful conversation that we'll tee up here in just a minute.

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But before we get to that portion of the podcast, we're going to give the people what they want.

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You're going to tell them something that you're for and something that you're against, or at least I think that's what you're about to do.

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Yeah, well, what we were talking about beforehand, this is not my pro con, but we were talking about beforehand that.

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So you're telling me this is free. This is extra bonus content. OK, yeah. So we record for people that don't know, like four weeks in advance because it takes a while to get everything edited and out.

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John, don't pull the curtain too far back now. Yeah, I know. So last night was election.

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Oh, was it ever. And we are recording still not knowing who our president will be.

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True. And so we had an interesting conversation about that. And it is kind of weird to think that, you know, in the past few years and elections, we've kind of always known by November 4th who it is.

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And so it's a little weird not knowing, you know. Yeah, I think that there can be bipartisan agreement that it would be nice to see a more unified approach to counting votes across the states so that we can have more timely results in subsequent elections.

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I think we can all agree that that would be good. And at the risk of sounding very cliche,

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I am reminding myself, as I trust all believers are, that even though we do not know the results of our presidential election, we do know that Christ reigns, that He's on the throne, and that He wins in the end.

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And so our hope is is fixed on Him. And politics are not ultimate.

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So we can know we can rest in the Lord Jesus, knowing that He is ultimate, even as we have aimed to be good citizens here in the

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United States of America. Yeah. Sorry to usurp and hijack your pro con there,

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John. But you I'm just thankful that social media will go back to its insanity.

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Oh, my gosh. Before the election, it's prior insanity.

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It's prior insanity. Hey, my pro con is this. This morning, I was very thankful, very thankful for coffee.

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I like a good, strong cup. Reacher. Come on, man.

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Give me a very I don't like weak coffee. If you can see through the coffee, there's something that's called tea.

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That's called brown water. And I'm not I'm not interested in brown water. I want black sludge.

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You're you want your coffee to to have a little scrimp. That yeah, I want it to bite me a little bit, you know, or as some people say, you want to you want to chew on it a little bit.

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You want to be able to stand your spoon up in it. Amen. That's right. That's right. So I'm for that, you know, maybe a little cream, no sugar.

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As a matter of fact, what I am against is coffee that isn't coffee.

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It is some. Sugar infestation, gross, disgusting, you wrap up, you have just offended one of the elders of our church.

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No, he gets he gets hounded relentlessly for the fact that he drinks milkshakes, not coffee.

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That's right. Yeah, that's right. So funny story that we'll move on.

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I actually I never drank coffee until seminary. I thought I literally would drink it.

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My wife would drink it. And I thought, man, I would rather go out and lick asphalt. I mean, that's what it tastes like.

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Wow. And so, yeah, strong statement. Yeah. People even ask me, you've licked asphalt. I'm like, man, I used to BMX race and jump.

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So, yeah, my face was often in the dirt and on the in the asphalt. And then in seminary,

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I needed to stay awake past midnight and found out that coffee tastes gross, which also kept you awake.

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And then the caffeine, you didn't want to get hopped up on Mountain Dew. No, I needed something without sugar in it.

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So we went with coffee and been drinking it ever since. But yeah, I'm not I'm just I don't sugar and coffee is gross.

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It's disgusting. First cup of coffee that I ever had was black and I've never really had it any other way.

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I will put some cream in like decaf coffee after dinner. Like if Michelle and I go out for a nice date and we do the whole nine yards like drinks before, you know, salads, appetizers, meal, and then we do dessert with a little bit of coffee.

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I'll do a little bit of cream then just because it's nice. But, you know, the only reason I do these pro cons, it's just to get people irritated.

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It's the only reason. For real. So you mean you're trying to like inflame people in their little bit like their passions and things like that?

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Yeah, I hear you. So good transition. The conversation. Yeah, we're we're really good at this.

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The conversation that we're going to have today is an important one. And this is one of those days where John and I were talking about various things before we were going to hit record.

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And we actually had a different episode planned to be recorded today. And we called an audible because we got into a very good and lively conversation amongst the two of us about what we're going to discuss today.

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So here at Theocast, we are I rejoice in this reality. I know John does, too.

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I know that Jimmy does as well. We are known for, and even our taglines and all that would reflect this.

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We are known for heralding the finished work of Christ and pointing weary saints to Jesus and extolling the mercy and the grace and the power, the sufficiency of Christ, and then heralding the rest, the message of rest that we have in Christ.

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And so that's what we're going to continue to do. It's what we're all about. I know that we are tremendously encouraged as struggling saints ourselves as we consider what

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Christ has done for us. And I think here at Theocast, this is also a really good thing. We are known for presenting a compassionate perspective when it comes to the struggle and the battle that often characterizes this pilgrimage called the

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Christian life. But we don't ever want to be misunderstood because sometimes people hear the message of rest, sometimes people hear the emphasis on compassion and might wrongly assume that that means that we are somehow soft peddling sin.

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And in fact, as Reformed Christians, we have an understanding of sin that is very robust and want to come in and say sin is actually a far bigger deal than any of us naturally think.

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Sin is far worse than any of us have ever conceived of it being, and it has all kinds of very practical implications for us in our lives in terms of our experience and our fight and our battle and our struggle.

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And so we want to have a conversation today about sin and about our fallen nature and what that means for us at the level of lusts and cravings and passions and desires.

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We all have them. The Bible speaks to these things. And what the Bible has to say about this stuff,

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I think sometimes, even for those who have sort of dipped their toe in Reformed and Calvinistic thinking, I think sometimes this can be a shocking reality for some.

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And certainly for the broad evangelical out there, if you're listening, we're thrilled that you are.

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This may be a presentation of sin that you maybe have never heard before and that we would stand by, that we think the confessions speak to, and certainly we think the scripture speaks to.

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That's right. That's good. Sometimes I think the world has a better theology of sin than we do. They describe it as this, well, we're just human.

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They understand humanity equals struggle, weird cravings, things that aren't natural.

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In their psyche, they understand there are certain things that aren't natural. And because of that, it's part of being human.

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And when we become Christian, that seems to get flipped as if, well, now that the

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Spirit lives within me and now that I've been transformed, the cravings are supposed to be gone away with, which doesn't make any sense.

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So, I think there's a couple of things that you're going to hear us touch on and help you explain.

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One is a sinner -saint reality, a very important theological concept where you have the

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Spirit and you are still in the flesh as far as your body.

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Paul describes this in Corinthians as a new kind of creature that has never existed before. There never existed a sinful creature with the

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Spirit indwelling in them. So, we're a new kind of creature. We misinterpret that as new creation, meaning that, oh, a whole thing is a pathway.

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Behold, all things are new. Therefore, you should not struggle and have these cravings. No. And then secondly, there's the concept that kind of closely ties into this, which is that we are not this way because we send.

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In other words, we act and therefore we have become. We are this way because we've been born this way.

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So, this kind of gets into, I think, what you were going to touch on, Justin, which is Ephesians chapter two really unfolds the state in which we are born, and that becomes the natural cravings by which we struggle with.

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Yeah, absolutely, man. So, we're dealing here with a biblical understanding of the fall of man and a biblical understanding of what it means to be born into a condition or a state of sin, and the place that we're going to start, as John already said, is

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Ephesians chapter two. The language of Paul there, especially in the first three verses of Ephesians two, is very helpful and is a great launching point for us here.

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So, Ephesians two, one and following, read this way. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived, in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

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Just a few comments there. We were dead in our trespasses and sins, so this speaks to what we are naturally.

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And this was another podcast for another time. We weren't just sick in need of healing. We weren't just broken in need of fixing.

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We weren't just dirty in need of cleansing. Like, we were dead and needed resurrection, and that's what the gospel provided.

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But then Paul talks about what is true of all people naturally. We follow the course of the world.

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So in that sense, we do what everybody else does. We are like a leaf or a piece of debris being carried down a stream.

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You know, we just kind of do things because it's the normal thing. Like we see a crowd and we're drawn to it.

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We're like sheep who just kind of follow along and don't even know why we're doing it. You know, that's true of us in this world.

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We are following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Well, who is that?

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If we're following the course of this world, who determines the course of this world? Well, it would be the prince of the power of the air, namely

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Satan, the ancient serpent who is the devil, who Paul calls the God of this world in 2 Corinthians 4, right?

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So we're enslaved to Satan in that regard. And finally, he says, we all lived amongst the sons of disobedience.

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We all lived as sons of disobedience in the passions of our flesh. So he's talking about passions, lusts, cravings, desires of our fallen flesh, carrying out the desires of the body or the desires of the flesh, literally in the

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Greek, and of the mind, right? And we're by nature, children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

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So again, to your point, this is not something that we become. This is something that we are in our nature, in our essence, as fallen children of Adam.

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And so what we're talking about in part today is we're thinking about sin and how it manifests itself in our lives.

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And we're using the language of Ephesians 2, and we're going to look at some other passages. And we may even look, John, I may reference the 1689 chapter six, paragraph two and three.

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We're thinking about the passions, the lusts, the cravings, the desires of our fallen flesh.

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And like not to bury the lead, I'll just go ahead and say this, and we'll unpack this more as we continue the conversation, because of sin, because of the fall, we all have, naturally have, cravings, lusts, passions, and desires that are wrong.

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That's right, that are contrary to the nature of God and the original design of humanity, right?

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So to help understand this, so when, in Ephesians chapter two, when Paul says we've been gifted something, what we've been gifted is faith and the unity that, our union with Christ.

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So we become one with him, not only in what the blessings we shall receive, but also his spirit becoming one with our spirit.

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And now he empowers us not only to believe, but to obey. The one thing that's very clear in scripture that has not been gifted to us, which is the result of our faith, it's already not yet.

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We've been promised a new body where sin will not reside. That's glorification.

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We don't have that now. So there's this duality that's happening, which is

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I can believe in God. I can even obey God, but I can't do it perfectly because I'm still entangled in my own flesh, and what ends up happening is that Christians don't feel as if they can confess or admit they have wild passions.

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Passions, what I mean by wild is that they're unnatural to God's intentions. They're untamed.

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All right, so let me take us now to Romans one, because I assume that this text is rising up in the minds of some, and we want to make some comments here.

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So Romans one is also helpful in trying to think about what we are as fallen children of Adam.

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So it's several points in Romans one, and this in particular is the section verses 18 to 32 of Romans one.

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But even more specifically, beginning in verse 24, Paul's going to use some interesting language.

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So there's already been talk about how we have exchanged the truth about God for a lie. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

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That's just what fallen people do. Romans one, 24, 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.

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Amen. He's going to go on to talk about, for this reason, verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

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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.

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Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves a due penalty for their error. Verse 28, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge

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God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not be done. So this is the reality that we all are born into.

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Sometimes in America anyway, John, you'll hear pastors talk and Christians talk, and they're like,

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America better be careful. Like if we don't do what we ought to do, then God's going to do this.

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He's going to give us over to this, to which we want to come in and say, hold the phone. Like, no, this is something that God has done.

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Like this is our reality, right? In Adam, as fallen creatures, we have been given over, to use

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Paul's language, to the lusts of our hearts. We've been given over to dishonorable passions sexually, and we've been given over to a debased mind to do what ought not be done, and just a couple of comments by way of clarification.

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When Paul will even talk about homosexuality in this text, and he says that women and men each exchange natural relations for relations that are unnatural,

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I think one of the things that we're going to contend for in this podcast is that because of the fall, a biblical robust understanding of sin would actually help us understand how people are born and grow and hit puberty and have always been attracted to people of the same sex.

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That's something that people experience, and a reformed understanding of sin would explain that, that things no longer are the way they ought to be in a

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Genesis three world. Sometimes we are born and naturally have cravings that are wrong.

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We all do. What Paul means by natural relations there, I think we can make a few comments. One, heterosexual union is normative.

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Heterosexual union is the only means of procreation, and heterosexual union is God's design.

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That's what he means by natural relations there. We don't need to get mired in the weeds here, but sometimes

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Christians will mean well, and they will try to contend that certain kinds of cravings and lusts are actually not natural to man, but they're decisions that people make, like they're actually stuff that people sign up for and make conscious choices for, and I think what we want to say is actually, no, there are so many things that at the level of lust and craving and desire that we all battle that we didn't choose and that we did not sign up for, and at the same time, those cravings and lusts and passions are still very wrong, and we are called to deny them.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest, and we the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance, and you can get this at theocast .org

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slash primer, and if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our total access membership, that's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry, and you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

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We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation. Oh, I've had friends and church members of prior churches

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I was at, they would say, trust me, if I could choose otherwise, I would choose another sin to struggle with.

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I don't want to struggle with this, to which I think anybody who has a crippling sin that they struggle with would say this, and part of today's podcast is to try and think through how we can show compassion and not compromise on the law.

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I don't want to compromise on God's law because you can't have a pure gospel if you don't have a pure law, so I don't want to compromise on God's law, and I want to be very compassionate towards all who struggle.

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Those things are not mutually exclusive, which is what we're here to say. I think that compassion and patience within Christianity, it seems like we have patience and compassion for some who struggle with sin, and then there's others who tend to see homosexuality or any type of sexual sin as something that's unforgivable and something that no one should ever, it's the unspeakable that no one should ever struggle with.

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Then there's the flip side that Justin, you and I were talking about earlier, where we are so compassionate, and I would say it's really not compassion,

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I think it's a confusion. We're so confused on this matter because we've been influenced by the culture that to say anything against struggles with same -sex attraction is not loving, and to put

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God's law in as loving as we can is wrong, and it's more compassionate to not say anything or to make a stand or to make exception in these circumstances is a confusion.

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I think what we're trying to do is come in and say, let's point to what the Bible says, let's look at it, and say, we can be loving, patient, and compassionate and still offer with full confidence

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God's law. Justin Perdue Just a brief interjection on that. A lot of times people accuse, even us and those who espouse a theology similar to ours, they'll say that we are a part of a hyper -grace movement or something.

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I sort of bristle at that term because I don't think biblically you can overemphasize grace. What people mean when they start to talk about hyper -grace or whatever is they're actually talking, like you said, they're talking about a confusion of what grace is and what the point of grace is, like what's it for.

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Grace does not exist. Here I say this, grace does not exist so that we can call things that are wrong, right, grace does not exist so that we can just say that sin is okay.

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Grace exists because sin is wrong and because real wrong exists and we all do it and therefore we cannot stand on our own and we have to have a righteousness and an atonement that somebody else accomplishes for us that is given to us by grace through the means of faith.

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That's what we are saying and there is a huge distinction in what we're saying and then saying that sin is okay or saying that there really is no such thing as something that's wrong.

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Oh, because you know, like we all struggle. Anyway, that's just a brief interjection. Let me, John, before we maybe even move forward anymore, we've already talked about Ephesians two, we've talked about Romans one.

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I want to read from the 1689 London Baptist Confession very quickly. This is chapter six, paragraphs two and three.

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Chapter six is the fall of mankind and sin and its punishment. This is helpful in thinking about what happened to us when

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Adam and Eve fell and what this means for us now as children of Adam and Eve.

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So 1689 London Baptist Confession, paragraph two. By this sin, this is the original sin of Adam and Eve, our first parents fell from their original righteousness and communion with God.

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We fell in them and through this death came upon all, all became dead in sin and completely defiled in all the capabilities and parts of soul and body.

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So every aspect of our person has been corrupted and affected. That's a big deal. Paragraph three.

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By God's appointment, they were the root and the representatives of the whole human race. Because of this, the guilt of their sin was accounted and their corrupt nature passed on to all their offspring who descended from them by ordinary procreation.

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Their descendants are now conceived in sin and are by nature, children of wrath, the servants of sin and partakers of death and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the

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Lord Jesus set them free. That's great language. It's robust. It's biblical. It paints an accurate picture of what happened to us in Genesis three.

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When Adam and Eve sinned, it depicts the ruin that we have all been plunged into.

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It should not surprise us, John, that we have desires and cravings that are natural to our fallen nature that are wrong and contrary to what

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God says is right. So this is why I get very confused sometimes when I hear

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Christians talk. They mean well, I think, and I alluded to this earlier.

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For example, when there's talk about, I'm not trying to pick on sexual sin here, but this is always a very charged up topic and people get worked up over it.

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So if we're talking, for example, about same -sex attraction, Christians will buck at the idea or will do everything that they can to disprove any notion that people could ever be born with a certain proclivity or could ever be born with a certain set of lusts and cravings and desires that would lead them to be attracted to people of the same sex.

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Because Christians wrongly understand and assume that if people are born with that, then that somehow exonerates them of any kind of guilt.

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If it's natural to me, if I'm born with it, so the reasoning goes, then I can't be told that I'm wrong to want it.

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And I just, I want to say time out, time out. Like, do you not realize that every single one of us is born with all kinds of desires and cravings and passions that are wrong?

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That's part of what, that's what it means. Like Bible 101, this is what it means to be a fallen child of Adam.

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It means that you are born not righteous, but corrupt. You're born not good, but wicked.

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And so why are we shocked that we would naturally desire things that are wrong? Like this speaks to the depth of our ruin,

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John, that this is how we all are. And I would even say it's natural to crave sin.

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Obviously, and there's, there's verity as far as what you will crave and there is verity, it'll have varying,

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I would say, let me see, intensities. So it's really strong for some people and it's really not for others.

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And there's no explanation other than that the flesh has different desires than other people.

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I mean, for instance, we could even just say people's, uh, some people eat when they're stressed.

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Some people drink, some people sleep. I mean, everybody does something different by, by nature that is not helpful.

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That's right. I would say if we're going to talk about this is how I was born, therefore everyone needs to accept it.

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Uh, I would say there's a large amount of people who are born that are not monogamous, that they have desires to be in relationships, whether it's, right.

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Uh, that they are, they are born, uh, to be in not only physical, but mental relationships with multiple people that are intimate and that God says is inappropriate.

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And so we could, we could argue any Christian who shows up to our church and says,

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Hey, listen, I was born to, to be with multiple people. And so I really need you to accept that.

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Yeah. Yeah. I need to, well, I'm going to make it sound a little more spiritual, but I was born to express my love and desire with more than one person, right?

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Cause it does, it makes it, it sounds more acceptable to say it that way. Like I was born to be with the same person, the same gender as me.

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And I, and I'll, and then this person next to me says, Hey, listen, I need you to accept me because God designed me to be with multiple people and experience love and the joy of love with more than one person.

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Well, I need you to accept that. Here's a controversial thought that I just popped into my head, brother.

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Um, you know, sometimes in the, in the culture anyway, and sometimes in the church, people talk like this, like nobody should tell me who to love.

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Nobody should tell me who I should love. And it's like, well, you're going to have to take that up with the Lord on the one hand, because he commands our affections all the time.

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He tells us what and who and how we are to love regularly in his word. You know, so it is to make that claim, like nobody should tell me who to love.

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Well, I think the Lord actually has. And, and we could talk about that maybe some other time.

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I want to pick up just really, really quick interjection on something you said, John, that I think is important. We are not trying to say that everybody struggles in the exact same way.

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We are not saying that the intensity is the same for every person when it comes to these various cravings and lusts that we have, and we are also not saying that all sins are the same in terms of the consequences that they bear and bring with them in this life, that would be foolish to claim what we are saying is that every human being without exception is born with these cravings and passions that are wrong.

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That's right. No, and I couldn't agree more. And one thing I want to clarify here. So two things to point on before I get into the next point.

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If someone comes to me and says, but John, you don't understand I was born this way. And I would say, oh, I totally understand. And I completely agree that most likely you were born that way.

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That doesn't justify. Sin has to be sin. I'm not a biologist, but yeah, I agree. Yeah.

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Well, there's studies out there now that talk about how they can look at your

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DNA and really tell you what you're going to struggle with or not say struggle. They're going to tell you what your proclivities are.

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Right. And that should bother Christians not at all. No, and someone was using that to try and prove to me that, well, homosexuality can't be there for a sin.

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And I was like, listen, proclivities is a part of humanity.

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And we all know, like, for instance, there are people who were born to, they have like this natural desire to kill things like animals and cause it to suffer.

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It doesn't mean it's just okay. Well, brother, for some people, anger, covetousness, you name it, fill in the blank, is as natural as breathing.

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I mean, this is what we're saying, that for all of us, we don't all have the same struggles, but we all have these lusts and passions that are as natural as breathing, that are a part of our constitution, and it speaks to the depth of our corruption and ruin.

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Like we short sell, if anything in the church in America, in evangelicalism, I think sin is sold short.

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Like we don't actually depict it in all of its depth and horror. That's right. Which then affects how we understand what we need.

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Yeah. And I want to clarify, there are people who like to hunt. That's not what I'm, there are people who like to kill things.

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That's not what I meant. Everybody knows what I mean. Torturing animals is not a good thing.

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Um, some people would say hunting is torturing animals. We're not getting into that. I don't, I shot a squirrel.

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I shot a squirrel this morning. We're going to have to edit this out, John. This is going, this is going in a bad direction. All right.

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All right. So there's two things I want to do here. The reason why this podcast is important is that we need to have the weight of our flesh and the cravings of our flesh upon us because multiple times,

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Peter, Paul, and James all warn us about the cravings of our flesh and how Satan absolutely will come in and trip us up.

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And the gospel becomes very important because the gospel faith is what helps govern our flesh.

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Colossians chapter two, where he says, all of these things appear to be wise in controlling your flesh, but are of no value, and he's talking about asceticism, things about beating our body or strapping our body or using starvation tactics that don't work.

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And this is why some people assume, well, in the old Testament, they didn't have the spirit to control them.

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In the new Testament, they have the spirit to control them. Therefore, these things should not exist. And I am telling you, how can you read your entire new

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Testament, including first Corinthians, and think that Christians, not unbelievers, but Christians struggle with deep and dark cravings that are damaging and horrible.

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They're horrible. And I'm here to, like Justin and I are trying to help the Christian think through, like the church should be a place where Christians can come and confess these and people don't drop their jaw.

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Well, they don't drop. They should not be shocked. Like two things that are not mutually exclusive that I want to just beat this drum and be very clear.

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We can say that, yes, you, we all as Christians in the church have lusts and passions that are a part of our fallen nature that are flat out intense, strong, and can be near crippling to us at points.

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And it is okay and safe for you to come and confess those things because nobody's going to be surprised that you struggle with that stuff.

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And on the other hand, at the same time, those passions and those cravings and those lusts that you have that you were born with are wrong.

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Like both are true. It's safe for you to confess it and nobody's shocked. And at the same time, it's wrong.

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And we're going to be very clear about what God has said is good for us. And we're going to lovingly exhort one another towards the things that are good.

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And at the end of the day, John, like where we land with this and what this drives us to is the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has done for us.

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And so this is where I want to pivot briefly to Christ and the gospel. I think what we're saying is absolutely biblical.

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And we come to this text inevitably about every third or fourth podcast because it's so important.

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Romans chapter seven. I mean, what we are describing is Paul's Romans seven reality, where he writes so movingly and so powerfully about his own state and his own war that he's having internally between his flesh and his spirit, the inner man and his flesh.

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And he writes things that are compelling, man. And in saying that, I find that there is another law, waging war in my members, against my spirit.

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I find that I don't do the things that I want to do and I'm not doing the things, excuse me,

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I do the things that I don't want to do and I'm not doing the things that I want to do. And he ends up landing in a place where he even says of himself, wretched man that I am.

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And I think we all have been there, where we are battling so hard against these cravings and lusts and passions.

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Sometimes it's going okay, by God's grace. Sometimes we're doing well, but there are some days where we are like, my goodness, this is unrelenting.

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It's chasing after me. It has its claws in me. It won't let up. God have mercy on me.

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Like, Lord, I am a wretch. Who will deliver me? And then we have only one answer and only one hope and his name is

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Jesus and it's what he's done for us. Man, it's such good news.

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When we're honest about our corruption and we're honest about these cravings and lusts that we all have, we've only got one place to go.

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I mean, you have one choice to just say it's all fine. It's no big deal. Nobody's wrong, but the

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Bible doesn't allow you to go there. The Bible says it is wrong and we're all like, well, I'm enslaved to this stuff, it feels like.

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I know I've been delivered from the dominion of sin, but man, I don't feel delivered. Where do

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I go? Only Christ. Only Christ is your hope and your stay and only

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Jesus is your righteousness and only Jesus can give you forgiveness and absolution.

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Only Jesus can atone for your sin. Only Jesus can make right everything that is corrupt about you.

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I think that the problem on both sides, so one where we will lower the law and make room for acceptability,

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I'm saying it's okay for you to have this sin, you can't find the joy and relief that is found in Christ, the hope and rest that is there because sin will always prevent you if you harbor sin and you're unwilling to confess that sin, it will remove that sense of rest and assurance that is there.

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On the flip side, if you require someone to never have the craving or they can't have rest is also dangerous, that is not the gospel, so I think what you have to do is the weight of the law has to come in and say there's condemnation for those who engage and are unwilling to repent and there's mercy and grace for those who struggle and repent.

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What I love about 1 John is it doesn't say you can repent once for one sin. It says that if you sin, you confess it.

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Listen, we'll get into this a little bit in the members podcast where we're going to talk about what is accountability and maybe how we skewed that in Galatians 6 .1,

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but where I want us to feel this tension is that the church should be able to come in and not ostracize one sin and be able to openly agree with the culture everyone, not just homosexuals, but everyone is born with some kind of proclivity and some kind of bent towards unnatural desires and you can still have rest and joy in Christ as you battle these and as you understand that we're waiting for Christ to come and fix all of these desires to where we will have human flesh, human desires that never contradict the nature of God, but we're not there yet, so we need to be patient and kind and merciful and look to Christ in faith to find our rest.

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Because I'll tell you this, Justin. When rest became real to me is when I learned how to live every day struggling with my flesh, struggling with my sin, understanding it's wrong and really wanting to fight against it, but understanding that it's

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Christ's love and righteousness for me that I can relax in and not because I've achieved perfection.

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Some people will never rest because they think, well, once I stop struggling with sin, I'll rest.

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I'm telling you, you can have rest now as you fight and struggle. Justin Perdue That's the wonderful message of the gospel is that you can have rest and peace and hope in the midst of the struggle against sin.

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That struggle and that battle is not going anywhere until Christ returns. It's a battle and a war that we have on our hands, and the struggle is real.

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So, we've got to have a Christ, and we've got to have a message that speaks hope and rest and peace into that war, and that's what the gospel is.

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You're exactly right. You wanted to say something? Justin Perdue Yeah. So, if you're in the vein where you won't allow someone to have the cravings that are contrary to the

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Bible, you're going to really prevent people from having rest. If you're in the vein where you really don't want people to feel uncomfortable with their cravings,

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I want everyone to feel uncomfortable with their sinful cravings because you can't have rest in Christ until you realize you need

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Him. Justin Perdue I want to give a hearty amen to that, John. I think a lot of times we try to rationalize a lot of stuff, and people in the church, again with good intentions, will say things like, well, it only becomes sin at the point in which

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I act upon a corrupt desire. Wrong. To even desire sin is wrong.

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We have to get at the level of the heart and the mind. When Paul speaks, like in Ephesians 2, about passions and lusts of our flesh and the desires of the body and the mind, this is what he's speaking to.

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To have those passions and lusts is wrong, and to be governed by them is what was true of us before, and it's only in, like you said,

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John, staring it in the face and calling it what it is, and owning the fact that I often lust after things that are wrong, and I crave and desire things that are wrong, that ultimately will drive me to Christ and will help me to see the real state of my need and help me to see how desperate

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I really am so that I then am like, okay, I'm at the end of myself completely.

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As Martin Lloyd -Jones said, the gospel begins always where man ends. When we are at the end of ourselves, we can then cast ourselves upon the mercy of God in Christ because we realize that we have nowhere else to go and nowhere else to look and nowhere else to rest or stand, and that's critical.

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I think we've said things like this before, but just an observation here too. The difference between a

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Christian and somebody who's not a Christian is not that Christians don't sin and people who aren't Christians sin.

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It's not that people who are Christians don't have corrupt desires and that people who aren't

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Christians do have corrupt desires. No. The difference is that for the

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Christian, we have taken God's side. We have agreed with God that our actions are wrong and that our desires and our lusts and our cravings are wrong, and we actually are grieved by them.

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We fight against them imperfectly but really, and we are looking away from ourselves to Christ for our righteousness and for our forgiveness and our peace.

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That's the difference. God, by his Spirit, will work in us to transform our lives, but that's going to happen at various rates at varying times.

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Why that is, I don't know. We'd have to ask the Lord about that. Right. I mean,

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Paul makes it very clear, and I agree completely with everything that he says here.

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Paul says, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you—sexual morality, impurity, passions, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

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On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked when you were living in them.

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We are not saying the Christian does not pursue fighting the flesh.

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We're saying it. Absolutely. But what we're trying to say is Paul is acknowledging there is a battle.

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Paul is acknowledging there is these desires. He wouldn't tell you to put them to death if they weren't there, and so we need to say, as Paul acknowledges these, so should we.

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We don't. To say that they don't exist or they shouldn't exist, it's just not scriptural.

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I don't think it's biblical. No, it isn't. And it's even a theology of the cross understanding of the

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Christian life. We follow a crucified and suffering Messiah, so on the one hand, a theology of the cross means that we too will suffer and we're going to be weak.

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We're not strong in and of ourselves, but part of what a theology of the cross does is it calls us to deny ourselves and love others.

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We are called constantly to deny the cravings and the desires of our flesh, and that is not legalism.

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That's not some kind of crazy talk. That's just biblical, and it's the experience of every believer. The reason the struggle is real is because it's a struggle in the first place.

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We're actually fighting against our cravings and our sins, and so I think the saints understand that reality.

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This has all kinds of implications, John, for pastoral care in the church.

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Do you have anything else you want to add? You do. I do. One thing is, we'll put it in the notes. We did an entire podcast.

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If you're brand new to Theology of the Cross versus Theology of Glory, you need to hear that podcast. It's available for free.

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You can go and listen to that. We'll put that in the notes. Secondly, I know where you're going, and I want to throw out something.

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One of the struggles I have with this whole conversation is people naturally say, okay, so there's struggle.

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Now we need accountability, and I want to say—and I'm not going to be able to explain it here, so I'll have to do it in the members of the podcast.

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Most people's explanation and understanding of accountability is so gospel -less and without the function of the church, it just literally becomes an

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AA program that I do not think is effective, and I'll explain why later. I'm tracking with you, brother, and I look forward to having that conversation.

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That's where we're headed. We're going to go over to the members' podcast, and we're going to talk about what this theology, this stuff that we've been talking about for the last 40 -something minutes, what this means for pastoral care, what this means for life in the church, what this means for watching over one another as brothers and sisters in the faith and caring for each other.

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As John said, there are many unhelpful notions that exist out there. A lot of times when we talk about things like accountability, we end up meaning something and trying to pursue something that John and I think is somewhat at odds with the

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New Testament. If you're interested in hearing that, we're going to have that conversation in the members' area.

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You may be new to Theocast, as John just acknowledged, and you might not even know what we're talking about when we say that we have a members' podcast.

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One of the ways that we accrue and gather support for our ministry here and fund some of the things that we're doing is we ask people to partner with us in this ministry.

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People do that through our Total Access membership where folks are able to support us monetarily each month.

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That's a way that we are able to work to spread this message of Christ and the rest that we have in him to as many people as possible.

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If you want to know more about our Total Access membership, how you can partner with Theocast, and the various materials and things that that would give you access to, you can find information about that over at our website, theocast .org.

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We leave that to you. There's a lot of good stuff over there on the site. Navigate that stuff. Send us your questions.

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Call us, email us, whatever. We always love to hear from our listeners. We look forward to continuing this conversation over in the members' area.