Oscar Wilde, the Irish born writer, liked to say, “I can resist anything … except temptation!” Wilde also believed: “The best way to deal with temptation is to yield to it!” All of us deal with temptation. If a person is not a Christian they just give in to temptation. But temptation is difficult even for people who are genuine in their faith. A poor country pastor was livid when he found a receipt for a $250 dress which his wife had bought. “How could you do this!” he blurted. “I don’t know,” she cried. “I was standing in the store looking at the dress. Then I found myself trying it on. It was like the devil was whispering to me, ‘Gee, you look great in that dress. You should buy it.’” “Well,” the pastor said, “You know how to deal with the devil! Just tell him, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’” “I did,” his wife exclaimed, “but then he said ‘It looks great from back here, too.’”
The American culture is in love with temptation. We have not seen a temptation we did not like. Temptation Island is a television program built around the theme of people who deliberately place themselves in situations where they will be tempted. Four couples who have a serious relationship are placed on an island where twenty-six physically attractive singles endeavor to seduce them and be unfaithful to their partners. As soon as they arrive the couples separated and sent to opposite ends of the island for two weeks. They have no communication with each other until the episode is over. The time is spent on exotic dates with the singles with whom they are now surrounded. How sick is that? Sick on the part of those who try to get the other people to be unfaithful. Sick on the part of those who put themselves in that position. And sick on the part of those who watch and are entertained by it.
But temptation is not something developed by reality TV, it is a part of the reality of life. Temptations can be of two kinds: those things that come to us from the outside and those that come from within. James covers both of these in the first chapter of his book. One he calls trials, and the other he calls temptations. We are to be glad when we face trials from without, because they strengthen our faith. But nowhere are we told to rejoice at being tempted, rather we are told to resist.
There are three major points I want to make this morning, and the first is this: Every Christian must endure trials. Trials that come to us in life can become temptations if we do not endure. We can be tempted to give up or become angry at God. But Peter tells us that we are not to be surprised by these trials. He says, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12). He goes on to say: “. . . though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:6-7). If you are not facing trials of some kind then you are not alive. And at times the trials will be greater than at other times.
In our American way of thinking the best thing is to avoid trials altogether. We are pleasure and ease oriented rather than spiritually oriented. So when it comes to trials we would prefer to be spared from them rather than learn from them. This even translates over to our spiritual lives. Sometimes you may expect that when you become a Christian that everything will smooth out and your problems will be over, and then when new trials come — sometimes because you are a Christian — then it throws you. But the Bible teaches us to expect trials. And it teaches us to have a positive attitude towards them. In fact, we are told to rejoice over our trials, because they will serve to increase our faith. We can’t really know the depth of our character until we see how we react under pressure. These trials will teach us to trust God. They will prove that our faith is genuine and not shallow. And when others see how we endure the trials, it will bring glory and praise to God who is able to sustain his people through such times. Our faith will grow, and that is of more value by far than being delivered immediately from all our trials.
Let’s be clear, however, that trials do not come from God. He does not cause them. They come from our spiritual enemy. They come as a result of living in a fallen world. But we serve a God who can use even the evil of the world to bring about his own divine purposes. He can take the trials we face and grow our faith and increase our strength. He can even make the trial a blessing in the end. We may not want to go through it again, but we would not undo what happened because we see how God has worked through the trial.
No prize athlete ever reached the top without many hours of trial. Their times of training prepared them for the prize. The training itself was often boring, sometimes painful and seemed like it would never be over. Yet, it was those times that made the prize possible. The Bible says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). Paul wrote: “. . . physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:8). And the great promise we have is this: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).
But the second thing we need to understand is: Every Christian must resist temptation. Temptation is dangerous because it can lead to sin, and sin separates us from God. Sin destroys our relationship with God, and sin can destroy our lives. The Bible says, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). It is the devil’s expressed purpose to devour you and destroy your life. But he is clever. He promises to give you something you really want in order to get you to do what he really wants. You are lonely and he promises fulfillment in some kind of illicit relationship. You are having financial difficulty and he opens up an opportunity for financial gain that is dishonest. Someone has hurt you and he opens up an opportunity to get back at them. Maybe it is only the seed of doubt that you plant about them in someone else’s mind. Maybe your gossip is the truth, but you know it will cause them to lose face or experience difficulty.
When James says, “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed” (James 1:13-14). If God does not bring us trials, he certainly does not bring us temptations. No, temptations are cause by an appeal to our own internal desires. James is using an allusion to fishing and hunting when he talks of temptation enticing us and then dragging us away. The hunter uses a decoy which looks like the real thing but is not. The fisherman uses bait. To the fish it looks wonderful. A scrumptious mouthful of just what he was looking for, but what he could not see was the hook. The hook is barbed so that it does not come out once it is in. In the same way, the devil plays us for a sucker. He carefully places his decoy to lure us toward the trap. He places the bait skillfully on the hook. He lures us and then he sets the hook. What we thought was going to be something that fulfilled our needs is instead something destructive, filling our whole life full of poison.
The Internet has provided us with a whole new set of possibilities. You can shop online. Gamble on line. Invest online. Talk online. Forget the fact that it is virtual reality, it seems real to us. So people find themselves in make-believe cyber-relationships. They develop friendships with people they have never met and never will see. They make love to images on their computer screens. It seems like it is meeting a real need, but it is not long until we feel the devil setting the hook, and we are being dragged far away from our spiritual home. Before we realize it we are addicted and a deadly poison has entered our lives. Shortly after we take the bait we find ourselves being devoured.
Jesus said, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). Jesus taught that we are to take temptation seriously. We are not to entertain them. We are not to linger where they wait. We are to avoid them and flee from them. If we value our relationship with God then we will see temptation as the enemy calling us to do his bidding. It is his attempt to trap us and drag us away from God and his kingdom.
Rasputin, was a Russian monk who used his influence to control the Romanov family in czarist Russia. He told his followers that those who sin more require more forgiveness, and that those who sin with abandon will experience even greater forgiveness and joy. He said that it is the believer’s holy duty, therefore, to sin greatly! There have been all kinds of take offs on Rasputin’s twisted thinking down through the years. There have been all kinds of aberrations surrounding people’s attempts to excuse their sin. But the Bible says, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2).
This is what Deitrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. He was a pastor in Germany during World War II. Bonhoeffer vividly describes what it is like to be in the middle of a great temptation: “At this moment God is quite unreal to us, He loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real; the only reality is the devil. Satan does not here fill us with hatred for God, but with forgetfulness of God. … The lust thus aroused envelopes the mind and will of man in deepest darkness. The power of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us.”
The final point is that: Every Christian must take responsibility for his/her own life. There were some in James’ day who were saying that it was alright to sin because it was God who was tempting them, and therefore they were not responsible for their actions. Some were saying that it was good to sin, because the more people sinned the more God’s forgiveness and grace increased. And since we want more grace in the world we should sin freely. People in our day believe that it is impossible to truly good, and therefore to sin is to be genuine. Good people come across as phoney. People who resist temptation are rigid and stifling their true humanity. You are not being real and genuine.
Still other people say, “I know what I did was wrong, but I could not help it. Don’t blame me, the temptation was just too strong.” But the Bible says, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). When you are traveling down temptation highway, God will always provide an exit ramp. You don’t have to stay on that road. There is a way off, but you have to take it. You have to be looking for it. You have to want it to be there. If you look back after you have fallen to temptation, then you can see the opportunity God was opening up for you to escape. But you were too busy enjoying the ride at the time. You have to cooperate with God to escape.
Jesus said that sin was so serious that if our eye was causing us to sin then we should pluck it out. And if our hand was leading us into sin then we should cut it off, because it would be better to enter the kingdom of God with only one eye or one hand than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell (Mark 9:43-48). I think what he was saying was, deal drastically with anything that is causing you to sin. If you cannot control your spending, cut up your credit cards. If you have trouble with Internet pornography then cancel your Internet account. Better to be denied Internet access than access to the kingdom of God. If you are in an inappropriate relationship then cut that person out of your life. Better to enter the kingdom of God lonely than enter into hell with a companion. Trust God to meet your needs and wait on him. If there are places you go where it is difficult for you not to do wrong things, then refuse to go there again. If your friends are causing you to do things which are leading you away from God then leave those friends. It may be drastic, but it is better than the alternative.
The great comfort we have in all this is that Jesus Christ gives us the power to overcome the temptations of this world. He said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And one of the reasons he can help us overcome is that he has been there himself. We do not have a God who floated around on a cloud and refused to have anything to do with the world. We have a God who loved the world and came into the world in the person of Christ. He experienced all of life. The Bible says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16).
You will never become such a good Christian that you will never be tempted, because Jesus himself was tempted and felt its full effect. Because he has gone there before you and you will find grace and mercy to help you in your time of need.
This is the promise of God. He understands. He can help us. He will deliver us. He has been there himself.
Rodney J. Buchanan
March 4, 2001
Mulberry Street UMC
Mt. Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
TRIALS AND TEMPTATIONS
James 1:1-15
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance” (James 1:2-3).
1. Every Christian must ____________________________ .
2. Every Christian must _____________________________.
3. Every Christian must _____________________________
____________________________________________________ .
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (Mar 3, 2001)
1. What is the attitude toward temptation by many people in our culture?
2. Is temptation the same thing as sin?
3. Read Matthew 26:41. Why did his disciples not take his words seriously?
4. Why do Christians today not take temptation seriously?
5. Read Matthew 6:13. In this, the most important prayer of Jesus, he tells us to pray to be delivered from temptation. Why is this so important in the mind of Jesus?
6. Read Mark 14:38. What makes it so difficult to overcome temptation?
7. Read 1 Corinthians 10:13. What does God promise us here?
8. Read 1 Peter 5:8. What is the danger in not resisting temptation according to this verse?
9. Read James 1:13-14. What is the source of temptation?
10. How can trials become a temptation? What are we tempted to do when we face difficult trials?
11. Read Matthew 4:1 and Hebrews 4:15. What comfort do you derive from these verses?
