Supply Chains and Tripping Hazards

Something I never heard before 2020 were the two words, “supply chain.”  I looked into those two words and didn’t find them used together before the last half of the twentieth century.  Google books gives just one page of examples for the whole century and none in the nineteenth century.  Examples explode in the last twenty years.

Now that people use “supply chain,” historians provide supply chain advantage as the primary reason for victory in World War Two.  It was easier for the United States to get its supplies in Europe than for Germany to get theirs.  The Americans, over two thousand miles from home, had more and better supplies than the Germans, only hundreds of miles away.

The success of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War were short supply chains, essentially tunnels, jungle trails, and near limitless volunteers.  Among an assortment of lesser causes, this led to their victory over a superior foe.

To achieve success in life requires eliminating as many possible factors that impede that success.  Next week Monday, I’m supposed to have a hip replacement.  The booklet to prepare for it explains certain fundamentals like removing threats of tripping from the walking surface of your floors.  As you read that, it seems a bit of a “duh” moment.  And yet, people leave tripping hazards all over their lives.

Supply Chain Dysfunction

Life became more difficult for many people beginning in 2020 because of “supply chain” dysfunction.  The price of homes increased because it’s harder to get the supplies.  It’s also more difficult to find the people to build the homes.

God in scripture points out factors comparable to a broken supply chain and a tripping hazard.  Peter expresses one in 1 Peter 2:11:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Paul begs and commands those traversing their life’s path on earth, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.”  He didn’t say, “Stop sinning.”  Saying “stop sinning” is like saying, “Win the war.”  You want to win the war, but more basic than that is “build and sustain a supply chain.”  Remove tripping hazards.

Professing Christianity today acts like an industrial complex for fleshly lusts.  It isn’t abstaining.  It riddles the floor with tripping hazards.  If the goal is winning the war, not abstaining is a losing strategy.  It creates a disadvantage so large that it guarantees failure.  Fleshly lusts destroy the supply chain.

Winning the War

People might say they want to win the war.  They might publish multitudes of magnificent war victory posters.  Until they want to abstain from fleshly lusts and then abstain, they won’t.  In fact, professing Christianity today campaigns for feeding fleshly lusts.  It thinks its worst enemy is the command.  Professing Christianity reacts most harsh to the threat of abstaining from fleshly lusts than the fleshly lusts.

A popular phrase, reaching cliche status, I will still use because of its appropriateness.  Professing Christians shoot themselves in the foot when they do not abstain from fleshly lusts.  They might not like the idea, but they are in a war, a war they should desire to win.  Instead, they provide the way for their own defeat.  They have multiple bullet holes in both feet.  I think we should say that they want to lose.  Losing must in fact be their goal.  They are going to get tired of losing, they’ll lose so much.

“Dearly beloved” or “strangers and pilgrims” in this world find their interests in the world to come, not this one.  They instead plan their lives around a future kingdom and a heavenly city.  They invest for eternity.

Still, 1 Peter 2:11 expresses a command to believers, an unpopular mode of communication.  True Christians still participate in fleshly lusts, so Peter commands them to abstain from them.  Commands are not options.  He also provides the consequence of not abstaining.  Psychological problems, soul problems, are the worst ones people have.  They obliterate people and families like Sherman’s march tore through the South at the end of the Civil War.

Fleshly Lusts and True Christianity

Fleshly lusts cannot characterize true Christianity.  If fleshly lusts do, it isn’t Christianity.  It’s something else, not Christianity.  Someone who laps up fleshly lusts is not a Christian.

Biblical Christianity, true Christianity, is more than just a series of things someone doesn’t get to do that he might want to do.  It is wanting to do what Christ wants Him to do and liking it.  Loving it.

The soul that will operate in a godly manner will unhitch itself from fleshly lusts.  A soul that continues in its pursuit of worldly pleasure is not “converted” or “restored” (Psalms 19:7, 23:3).  God does not possess that soul.  It remains in the realm of the wicked one.  This is not a person who has lost his life (psuche, his soul) for Christ’s sake.  He still loves the world and the love of the Father is not in Him.

More to Come