“Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.” 1 Peter 2:11

Many of us still rely on email as an essential form of communication, and those of us who do are grateful for the built in filters that tag some incoming mail as “junk” or “spam” or “clutter” and move these suspicious emails to a separate folder without us even having to look at them. That’s good because most of these emails are a waste of time, or worse, they are scams trying to defraud us or come-ons designed to entice us to do things we really don’t want to do.

One of the ways to obey Peter’s exhortation in today’s focal verse is to try to live with a personal filter in our lives, a “junk detector” if you will.  In abstaining from sinful desires, that is—filtering out the junk in our lives—Peter encourages us in the next verse to “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

The Apostle Paul also encourages followers of Christ to have a junk filter on their lives, writing: “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” (Romans 13:13-14)

As you get better at applying a junk filter mentality to what you watch and where you hang out you can more fully focus on our Lord’s command to “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

Do you have a junk filter approach to life? Ask the Lord to help you to identify those things currently in your life that you should mark as junk.