Temptation

Temptation comes in many forms with many lies. The lies are not just based on “benefits” it promises but can never deliver on. The lies it tells you that are the most dangerous are the ones it tells you about your current reality. It’s the things it tells you before you commit to the deed.

Sometimes these lies are in the form of speeches, either from someone you know, something you are reading or from your own conversations with yourself. You know it is happening when you find yourself wanting to do what is wrong more and more. The more you listen the stronger the urge to act. There is a tipping point to this process where you are on your way to do what ever it is and nothing is going to stop you from participating. In fact you have believed the lies about your reality so much you are just biding your time to act on the very thing you knew before you believed the lies was a sin.

Sometimes the lies about your currently reality is about people in your life. Your spouse, your friends, your co-workers or your family. Sometimes it is about events in your life, which are either made to be “worse than they really are” which makes escape desirable or the promise of you will be able to cope with a bad situation if you just took this detour to “unwind” a little or if you took inappropriate action toward someone else in terms of violence or slander or just totally losing your temper all together.

Temptation uses rationalizations about your current situation to make the sin it is moving you toward look better. For example if you are experiencing hard times and you decided to steal you deed thats ok because the people you are stealing from will not really miss what you are taking. Or maybe its taking stuff just for the fun of it after all who is really hurt by you doing that?

The key words for a successful temptation is the phrase “I need”. If the tempting can somehow convince you – you need what ever it is and make you feel like you need it, the tempter knows you will fall every time. If the temper can convince you- you are justified in participating – that is a bonus – not for you but for the tempter.

How do I know this?

I have personal experience.

What is that experience?

I’m not going to tell you.

But what I can tell you is every time I am temped and I fall for it it revels a deeper root issue that I have in my heart that isn’t related but is connected to the temptation fallen for. It is that root cause that needs to be confessed more than the actual sin I was tempted to do. To just get forgiveness for the act and not cry out to God to help me with the root cause just means I will fall again and again…

and again.

So we pray – “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”.

We pray – Lord please don’t allow me to be blinded by the lies temptation tells me about my reality. Lord I want to resit temptation early before it moves to the place where it is to late.

“deliver me”

“deliver me”

“from all evil”