Desires of the Flesh

Ephesians 2:3

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you take a Bible please and turn to Ephesians 2:1-2 and they run like this, “And you he made
alive, when you were dead through 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.” And then verse 3 runs, “Among these,” I believe that’s referring to
“among the sons of disobedience” “Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh,
following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of
mankind.”

A lot of this we know already, but it might be good just to look at it again, “Among these we all
once lived in the passions of our flesh,” and we’ve often said that if you didn’t believe in God
there are certain things that you just naturally fall into and it would just be good common sense.
If you didn’t believe there was a God and you find yourself in this world, you look around you see
there are six billion others in it. It wasn’t hard to look around and think, “All these other
people are here and they’re all trying to do what I’m trying to do because I know I need food to
keep me alive, and I know I need clothes, and I certainly need shelter to keep myself out of the
weather, and they’re all after the same thing so I had better get my skates on and get going and
make sure I get my portion of what I need.” It just stands to reason that’s the way you’d think.

It’s alright when you have your mum and dad, for a while they provide those things, but whether they
tell you or not your own common sense tells you there’s going to come a time when you have to
provide for that yourself and you certainly become aware that you’d better get whatever food,
clothing and shelter you need to keep yourself alive whatever this life is about. Just in order to
stay alive, to even be able to entertain the question, what am I here for, you’ll have to have food,
shelter, and clothing. And it seems to me that is at the basis of almost every human being. In
fact, I would say every human being that is alive is very aware that they have to get those things.

Really, depending on what society you’re brought up in, you would be anxious for either a mud hut as
good as everybody else’s mud hut, or you’d be anxious for one little room in a large city, or you’d
be anxious for an apartment, or you’d be anxious for a beautiful house in the suburbs. It wouldn’t
really matter; somehow you would know you had to get shelter, clothing and food and that is part of
what Paul means when he says, “Among these people, the sons of disobedience, we all once lived in
the passions of our flesh.”

First of all “thelema” is the word he uses for passion and it can mean desire, and the flesh can
mean the body, and therefore, the body’s desires for food, clothing, and shelter are some of the
very first things we see as necessary. And we know ourselves that we’ve had our own moments when
we’ve realized, “Well yeah, I have to get a job, I have to have money, I have to provide these
things for myself, nobody else is going to provide them for me.” And so in that sense we walk, you
could say, in the desires of our body. We lived in those desires because we know they’re very
necessary and very essential.

I think we’ve also all talked at different times of how that gets perverted. In other words, it
wouldn’t be so bad if we just took a sane balanced attitude to those things and thought, “We need

them.” But the fact is that we become perverted in our attitude to them and if you ask why that is,
I think it’s because God created us in Jesus. Now we misuse this, but I think there is in some of
us, or maybe in all of us, the seed of the idea that somewhere it’s possible to have no anxiety
about anything. Somewhere it’s possible that someone supplies these things for us.

In other words, way, way deep down maybe in the worst of us there is something of Jesus’ own
confidence that says, “Look at the birds of the air, they do not toil or reap and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them, how much more will he feed you oh ye of little faith?” And there’s something
inside us that says it should be possible to get all that we need of food, shelter, and clothing and
not to have to worry about it. But I don’t think we take Jesus seriously. I think we just feel
that we need shelter, food, and clothing and if we had enough of them we wouldn’t have to worry at
all. And so there sets in the bad part of the Greek word “epithumia” the desire turns into what it
is sometimes translated in the Bible, as a lust or a desperate passion for the thing. And instead
of just deciding we have to get a job to get food, shelter, and clothing, we begin to give ourselves
to the whole idea of getting as much of those things as we possibly can so we won’t have to depend
on anybody. There’s where it begins to become a lust, and there’s where we begin to get into not
just meeting a need, but satisfying a desire to be like God without God. A desire to have the
benefits that God has given us in Jesus but without being weighted down or trampled by Jesus.

And I think that’s what Paul is saying; that the sons of disobedience live in that kind of a life.
And he says we all once walked in those same passions of our flesh. They start off as just natural
needs and the need is not the problem, it’s perfectly reasonable to have food, shelter, and
clothing, but we turn it into a lust for as much food, shelter, and clothing as we can get. In
fact, gradually it becomes more food, shelter, and clothing than other people have. That’s what we
mentioned yesterday that seems to be taking place for instance, in Silicon Valley where so many
people have become millionaires through the new dot com companies that have started. They’re
talking now about the problem of excessive wealth because you have children who are now wealthy
enough in themselves because some of them are making such huge sums on the stock market, even
playing with their computers, that they can have a Mercedes 500 to go to school in and that sort of
thing, and so they’re beginning to touch the terrible problems of excessive wealth and excessive
desire for more wealth. And it seems that that’s what happens to us human beings, we begin to turn
needs into desires that really are connected with our yearning for eternity, or for the infinite
possibilities of eternity, but of course, under our control not under God’s.

That’s why Paul says that all of us once lived among the sons of disobedience in the passions or in
the desires of our flesh. And he elaborates it a little in the next phrase, he says, “Among these
we all once lived in the passions of our flesh following the desires of body and mind.” Because it
seems that then those things take over and your body and your mind begin to dominate all the actions
of your life and begin to be dominated by fulfilling those needs. So there probably isn’t one of us
here that would not say, “Yes, I’m a bit startled to tell the truth how often I find myself thinking
about what I’m going to eat or about? Or, I find myself startled by thinking what a satisfaction I
get out of having some special little food treat. Yes, it is true that I do find myself often
following the desires of my body and my mind. And it’s not just my body, my body certainly seems to
enjoy the food, in a way, at times that may cause me a little concern but my mind seems to combine
with my body. I often find my mind not working on the things that it should be on, but working on
silly things that really are incidental. And I’m surprised how much of my thinking goes into either
how I look, or what my clothes are like, or how my room is, or what my shelter is like.” And it is
startling to find that people like ourselves, who often think we’re not among the sons of
disobedience yet we find ourselves following out the desires of our mind and our body and led along

by them rather than directing them.

And I think that is part of what Paul is saying; that we’re really taking an infinite supply of
these things that come in Jesus and we’re trying to ensure that we have them apart from Jesus. And
of course, that’s what leads to all the problems. That undoubtedly is what leads to the anxiety
because we get anxious. Here we are today and we have enough money, but somehow we get onto
tomorrow or the next day or the next month or the vacation or the year after. And the anxiety
begins to set in about how much money we’ll need for that, what clothes we’ll need, what shelter
we’ll need, what food we need and somehow or other the needs begin to be a dominating anxiety to us.
And indeed many of us would say that’s actually where a lot of our discontent comes in because we
begin to glance at other people and we see what they have and we think, “Well, it would be nice to
have that,” and that’s where a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the envy and the jealousy comes in.
And it’s because we take needs that are there and we turn them into lusts that dominate our lives.

We’ve said how natural it is in this world where you have six billion other people and everybody
seems to think everybody is important and of course, we ourselves think we’re important. And each
one of us, and we know it’s so true; each one of us is absolutely and utterly convinced that we are
unique. We think we’re pretty miserable in a thousand ways, but we do think there’s not another one
of us in this world, and actually there isn’t, there is not another person exactly like us. But of
course, we’ve said before that one of the irritating things is nobody else seems to realize that!
Nobody else seems to realize how unique we are, or they don’t give us the respect that we should
have and of course, that immediately unleashes the feeling we have that they ought to realize how
good we are. They ought to realize how valuable we are. We have a worth that they haven’t got and
so we begin to look for that importance and that significance.

Actually in a funny way, it’s right because you are unique. But you’re unique because Jesus has
taken no other form exactly like yours. That’s why you’re unique. You’re unique because you feel
something of what he feels his Father’s love for him is like. He feels his Father loves him because
he’s his only son and we get the benefit from that because we’re a unique part of him and so we do
feel that we are important. But of course, we want that without Jesus and so there the result is
all the striving for attention that actually embarrasses even us ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how often in the past years I’ve been embarrassed by the
way I try to draw attention to myself in all kinds of subtle ways. We are offended when somebody
doesn’t give us the attention that we think we deserve and it’s really because there’s a sense in
which we are the apple of God’s eye that nobody else is. Just as Jesus is the apple of his Father’s
eye, you are a unique part of Jesus and you are an apple in the Father’s eyes in a way that nobody
else is, but it’s in his eyes. And we don’t want that because it means we’ll somehow have to depend
on him or obey him, but we do want the sense of importance that that gives us and the only place we
can get it is from other people. So then we begin to walk again just like ordinary men or as Paul
says, we begin to walk following the desires of body and mind for attention and for a sense of
importance and a sense of self-esteem.

That’s why those feelings are so incomprehensible to us. I’m sure you’ve been in the same boat
where you’ve thought, “Why am I at all envious? Why am I at all jealous? Why am I at all proud of
that stupid little thing? Why?” And it’s almost something we can’t understand and it really is
taking something that is real, our value to our Father as part of his son, and we’re trying to
ensure that and get enough of it to give ourselves the satisfaction that can never come from anybody
but the Father himself. So I think that that’s part of what Paul means when he says, “For all of us

walked among these sons of disobedience and we lived in the passions of our flesh following the
desires of our body and our mind.” And I don’t know about you, but it does seem at times as if your
body and your mind are almost going independent of the way you want them to go.

I wondered for a while why he puts it that way, “following the desires of the body and the mind” as
if the body and mind are separate beings. But actually, it’s almost as if they are. It’s almost as
if we’re being dragged in a direction that we don’t want to go at all. And the last one that we’ve
often talked about is one of the things you become aware of not too far along the road in the life
and that is that there’s such a thing as death and it’s probably that, as much as anything else,
that makes us feel we better enjoy ourselves while we’re here. And so it’s legitimate, actually,
because God’s desire is for us to be happy, but to be happy in his son, and to be happy as part of
his family, and to be happy as people who possess all that he has given us. But we of course, take
that happiness and feel we better get all the happiness we can because this life is so short.

Now if we really believed and accepted reality that we’re going to be with Jesus for ever, that
we’re going to be alive forever, then we wouldn’t feel that it’s short. But because we’re not too
sure of that, we feel it’s short and we’d better pack into it everything we can. Somebody here
said, “Why do I look forward to thrills or little exciting moments?” I think all of us are the
same. We all want some excitement, we want to enjoy ourselves.
There’s a feeling that life is basically sad because it’s going to end and I better have what
happiness I can get now and grab it. And somehow what is a legitimate need because God wants us to
be happy and intends us to be happy and intends us to live in a perpetual party all the time with
him, but because we want that without him, we are trying always to achieve that on our own by our
own little manipulations.

So we often find our feelings actually being dissatisfied with just a flat steady eddy life. And
actually, the truth is that in that flat steady eddy life and the satisfaction of living fully in
that, there lies our happiness. But we feel it’s too dead, it’s too flat, there ought to be
something deader. Well, there is something deader and we will enter into that as Jesus has entered
into it. But at this moment, this is what God has for us but we aren’t satisfied with that so we
want something happy and so we’re always trying to arrange little treats or parties or exciting
moments or our vacation. It’s always something that will give us a little jump or a little kick and
of course, what that becomes is a dominating thing as we all know. When it turns into a lust it
turns into alcohol and it turns into drugs and just because we’re free from those doesn’t mean that
we do not have our own addictions that in a way we become a slave to.

And I think that’s again what Paul means when he says, “Among these sons of disobedience we all once
lived in the passions of our flesh following the desires of our body and our mind.” And I always
think that “following” has the idea of being led by the nose; don’t you feel that at times? You
don’t really want those things but just feel you ought to have them. It’s that that makes us bring
some of the discontent that we have in our lives and it’s partly, strangely enough, because we are
in Jesus. It’s partly because we’ve been created in him and we have a sense of the things that he’s
enjoying with his Father and we have some sense that those things ought to be in us. But instead of
going deeper into him for them, we try to produce them ourselves and of course, that’s why Paul
finishes verse 3, “Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires
of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

It might be good just to mention to you the real meaning of “We were by nature children of wrath.”
What Paul is saying is we’ve been brought up in this human race; we’re the sons and daughters of

this human race. We’re the sons and daughters of thousands of our forebears that have lived this
way and so actually we’ve inherited their nature and the things that they do we do and of course, we
know it ourselves how like our father or mother we are. So he’s saying, “In a way by nature you’re
like them. Even though you don’t want to be like them, in a way you’ve inherited that nature and in
a way you are by nature a child of wrath.”

Now, a child of wrath is not all bad but what does it mean? It means you’re a person who was made
in Jesus and therefore you have something of Jesus inside you as well as these other desires that
are not his — these desires that are for all he has, without him; these godless desires that want
to be God. As well as these selfish independent desires that want all of heaven without the burden
of God himself. As well as that, you have inside you Jesus’ own heart and desires and God is by
that means revealing to you how wrong your other desires are and that is part of God’s wrath; “Don’t
do that, you’ll get burned.” Well, it seems like wrath, but it is only one desire and one aim.
“Don’t do that you’ll get burned.” There’s only one purpose in it.

You may say, “That’s wrath.” Yes, but there’s only one desire — to keep the little one from
getting burnt and there’s only one reason why Jesus in you has borne the wrath of his Father. It’s
so that you will still be able to feel what is right and to know what is right. And yes, in a way
you are a child of wrath but the wrath has been worked out by our Father on our Savior Jesus and the
wrath is only there to let you know, “Son, that isn’t the way to go. Daughter, that isn’t the way
to be, there’s something better, there’s something far better.” In other words, we’re not just
children of disobedience; we’re also, thank God, children of wrath. We’re children who can feel in
our hearts that there is a loving trusting way to go. There is a way to be like Jesus and God wants
us to be like that. We feel his displeasure as we compare the good desires within us with the bad
ones. But we sense all the time that it’s not a displeasure that wants to destroy us but it’s a
displeasure that wants to end the old self and the old flesh, and let the new and the beauty of
Jesus spring forth. And I think that’s why he says, “We are all in a way, by nature, children of
wrath but children of wrath because God still cares for us.”

You don’t show wrath to something you don’t care about. You don’t. If you think of it, you don’t
even get bad tempered. You don’t let a hair be turned for something that you don’t care about. So
somebody tells you about something that has nothing to do with you and it doesn’t hurt you at all,
you only get concerned about something that you care about or something that you want to change. So
it’s probably wise for us to use the old word wrath rather than anger because anger somehow is in
our mind too tied to human expressions of anger. It’s probably wise to continue to talk about the
wrath of God but to see that this wrath is just part of his love. Its part of his love that says,
“I don’t want you to get lost. I don’t want to lose you. That’s why I’ve made you in my son.
That’s why I’ve put my son inside you. I want you to yield completely to him and to enter into all
the peace that he has and all the fulfillment that he has and not try to fill your own needs for
yourself.” So I think the verse is something dear and I’ll just read it again, “Among these we all
once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by
nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

But what he says is we all once lived, once, and that time has passed. Let us pray.