Scriptural Ways To Handle Temptation

The sign outside Immanuel Lutheran Church in Burnside, Iowa, “Lent is not the fuzz in your navel.”

 “Led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,…” The desert experience can be the place of mature repentance and conversion.. Basically, the desert represents a stripping away so as to make the fundamental things appear. One can discover strengths that one did not even know that one had.

1. In handling temptation it’s helpful to remember!

The first step of the Twelve Steps is analogous to staying free from sin, and the First Step is: We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable. Admitting this brings into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago, or longer—if we even remember at all; we can have a selective memory.

E.g. Sometimes we are like a train that decided that it was tired of running back and forth on the same boring track. The unhappy train thought of the adventure and excitement it was missing because it had to run on tracks. So one day he decided to jump the tracks. The result was a horrible crash.

The true nature of sin can been seen how “live” spelt backwards is “evil.”  Evil is anti-life.

So, our First Reading says: 'My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small household and lived there as an alien…” A wandering Aramean refers to Abraham or Jacob for their sojourns in Harran in Syria in Genesis 11. It speaks of a collective memory and identity, which implies a social and ethical dimension. “We” were oppressed in Egypt. E.g. We were oppressed by alcohol, drugs; images, greed, indulgence, sin.

This First Reading recounts the trials experienced in the history of the Israelite people not just to remember past oppression but the victory that God did for them. To fight temptation one is called to proclaim the history of deliverance.  Such a confession of faith ends with a grateful prayer with gratitude. God brought them to the Promised Land.

Some of the this-world Promises; 1: We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

Promise 2: We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

Promise 3: We will comprehend the word serenity.

2. Handing temptation: In times of weakness:

What is Jesus’ condition when he encounters the devil? He was at his most vulnerable state when the devil showed up. The number 40 is symbolic of probation and testing in the Bible, so Jesus was fasting for a while when the first temptation started.

 One solution when feeling weak or vulnerable is remember Scripture. Jesus said, “One does not live on bread alone...” Jesus was able to resist the devil with the help of Scripture passages he knew so well. In his apostolic exhortation “Catechesis in Our Time,” St. John Paul II wrote, “A certain memorization of the words of Jesus, of important Bible passages...is a real need.” (55).

Memorizing Scripture is one of the most helpful things you can do because the verse written in your heart will help you resist temptation and inform your whole life. What better time to begin memorizing than Lent?

Another solution for temptation is not to dismiss the smaller ones. Most of us can handle absolutely giant, obvious temptations that may entail throwing everything away if we sin in that way. However, as Solomon noted in the Song of Songs 2:15 thousands of years ago, it is the little foxes that eat the vines.

To illustrate: There was once an Englishman who startled the world by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Amazingly he escaped serious harm. However, he did suffer serious injury several years later. He slipped on a banana peel. That is the way the tempter works. It’s the little things that he most often tries to trip us up.

3). The Prayer over the Offerings at this Mass asks that we be given “the right dispositions” that our hearts may be disposed to understand the riches of Christ’s treasures. 

To illustrate: In Greek Mythology, sirens are commonly described as beautiful but dangerous creatures. Sirens are known for seducing sailors with their sweet voices that sang, and, by doing so, lure them to their deaths, so they could then collect the spoils from the wreckage. However, one day a ship sailed past the sirens without paying any heed to the song of the sirens.  The reason the sailors were not interested was that Orpheus, the god of music, was on board as part of the expedition, and he sang a sweeter song than any known to the sirens.

Fr. Champagnat used to say. “In the normal course of events, without prayer or mental prayer there are no actual graces; without abundant actual graces it is not possible to resist temptations and to preserve habitual grace and our vocation along with it, because mortal sin, while killing the soul, at the same time kills our vocation and razes the whole structure of our salvation down to its very foundations.”

Lent is the old English word for Spring. It’s not the fuzz in your navel. Amen.