Abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. ( 1 Peter 2:11 11 Beloved, I beseech you as sojourners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lust, which war against the soul; )

When I confronted a man about the adultery he was living in, I tried to understand his situation, and I pled with him to return to his wife. Then I said, “You know, Jesus says that if you don’t fight this sin with the kind of seriousness that is willing to gouge out your own eye, you will go to hell and suffer there forever.”

As a professing Christian, he looked at me in utter disbelief, as though he had never heard anything like this in his life, and said, “You mean you think a person can lose his salvation?”

So I have learned again and again from firsthand experience that there are many professing Christians who have a view of salvation that disconnects it from real life, and that nullifies the threats of the Bible, and puts the sinning person who claims to be a Christian beyond the reach of biblical warnings. I believe this view of the Christian life is comforting thousands who are on the broad way that leads to destruction ( Matthew 7:13 13 Enter ye in by the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that enter in thereby. ).

Jesus said, if you don’t fight lust, you won’t go to heaven. Not that saints always succeed. The issue is that we resolve to fight, not that we succeed flawlessly.

The stakes are much higher than whether the world is blown up by a thousand long-range missiles, or terrorists bomb your city, or global warming melts the icecaps, or AIDS sweeps the nations. All these calamities can kill only the body. But if we don’t fight lust, we lose our souls.

Peter says the passions of the flesh wage war against our souls. The stakes in this war are infinitely higher than in any threat of war or terrorism. The apostle Paul listed “immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness,” then said it is “on account of these the wrath of God is coming” ( Colossians 3:5 5 Put to death therefore your members which are upon the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry; –6). And the wrath of God is immeasurably more fearful than the wrath of all the nations put together.

May God give us grace to take ours and others’ souls seriously and keep up the fight.