The Loss of Innocence

Matthew 26:41 NIV

 "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak."

Do You Ever Enjoy Being Tempted?

When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a third year French class.  I did not bother doing the homework so I was dependent on my tests to get a passing grade.  That was not exactly a recipe for success so when my final came, I was in trouble.  The teacher gave us a long passage to translate in preparation for the final and I barely looked at it.  Like everyone else, I brought the study sheet into class the day of the final to go over it just before taking the test.  When I saw the exam, I realized my ship had come in, that I had a way to do well on my final.  It was word for word the French version of the English passage we were told to translate in preparation for the test.  In other words, my notes were the complete set of answers.  The only problem I had was finding a way of looking at the notes as I was taking the exam.  I slyly slid my notes under my test paper and started to try to translate the text on the exam.  I had two problems though.  I did not know my French well enough to do the translations and I was too scared to pull my study sheet out from under my test and actually use it to cheat.  When I realized that I was not bold enough to use the study sheet to get my answers and no matter how long I stared at the test paper, I would not be able to come up with the translation, I just got up and turned in my paper which most certainly would leave me with a failing grade.  Now I could claim that I did not cheat on my final exam which would actually be true but I certainly wanted to and only my fear of being publically humiliated by getting caught kept me from doing so.  You might say that when it came to cheating, my spirit was willing but my flesh was weak,

How many times a day do you think you are tempted to do what is wrong?  Are you ever tempted to lie, or gossip, or criticize someone to boost your ego or keep you from looking bad?  Are you tempted to be angry or drawn into lust?  Are you prone to feeling sorry for yourself or ever sucked into worry?  Are you tempted to keep your faith in Christ to yourself rather than share the Gospel with others?  Do you struggle with greed?  Have you been tempted to not give your ten percent to God because you want something or are afraid to part with it?  Have you been tempted to turn your back on someone in need or to pretend to not know someone needs your help?  Are you ever tempted to ignore God when He gives you direction?  What sort of temptations are you facing right now?

Temptation is typically thought of as something external and sin as internal.  You are responsible for your sin but not for the temptations facing you.  Of course in the moral climate where you live most sin is not considered sin and temptation is rarely given much thought either.  Yet Jesus insisted that you must think constantly about temptation; that you are responsible for not only sins you commit but temptations you don’t avoid.

Jesus had very little to say to the disciples as He went through the spiritual and psychological agony of Gethsemane.  He was laser focused on the Father as He processed the cross that was before Him.  There were no parables shared, no special teachings explained, just a command was directed to His followers.  "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." (Matthew 26:41 NIV)  Clearly Jesus did not think of temptation as a passive experience that overtakes you but rather something you can avoid.  The NIV translation weakens Jesus’ take on temptation.  The verb is not “fall” like something you might stumble into but “enter into”.  No one, unless he or she is acting chooses to fall, but entering into something is different.  It is you that must decide if you will enter into temptation, not Satan or some demon or even a tempter.  You are the one who chooses or does not choose to enter into temptation and Christ makes that very clear.   Much like the decision to enter into a park or a house or a church building, you decide if you will enter into temptation or not.

Jesus tells us there are two things we must do to not make the choice of entering into temptation.  They are watch and pray.  Both, Jesus says, must be done constantly, not once and move along but over and over again wherever you are.  Watching seems obvious.  Look out for temptations and be careful.  How many people have ruined their lives because they did not pay attention to the danger of a temptation?  The Titanic sunk because the captain did not pay attention to warning signs.  A friend of mine got into a car accident because he wasn’t paying attention to warning signs and now his car is wrecked.  Families have fallen apart because warning signs were ignored, addictions develop and crush lives because warning signs go unnoticed, people lose their jobs because they carelessly ignore warning signs.  What can we say about David and Adam and Solomon who suffered greatly because they did not see the risks involved in decisions they made!  How many lives did they wreck because they ignored warning signs involving temptation!

Rarely are we consciously aware of how great the risk a particular temptation carries.  Solomon probably did not know just how disastrous it would be for him to marry an Egyptian princess and David on the fateful evening was not aware of how going up on his palace roof one evening would tear apart his home and even his nation.  Was Adam aware of how great a temptation it was for his wife to listen to the serpent in the garden?  Probably not!  Would Custer have wished he could have been enlightened to the risk he was taking engaging the Sioux in battle at the Little Big Horn?  It takes supernatural powers to assess the true nature of most temptations.

Jesus did not just say to watch out for temptations, He commanded us to pray that we might not enter through the gates of temptation.  In a world that is growing increasingly unaware of the powerful spiritual forces working within it, prayer for any reason seems nonsensical.  “Just work harder”, you are told.  “Strike out on your own and make your dreams come true”, you are encouraged.  “Make your life your own”, it is proclaimed.  The supernatural working of God is declared an antiquated myth and yet there it is.  Christ says to pray so you won’t enter into temptation.

There is another factor that argues against praying you won’t enter into temptation.  Sinning often seems reasonable.  Why pray to not be tempted into sinning if you really do want to sin.  People who skip out on attending worship services or Bible studies do so because it makes sense to them to miss.  Those who don’t tithe have good reasons for not giving a full ten percent to God’s Kingdom.  You look at pornography or lie about something or get angry or hold a grudge because it makes sense to you.  You don’t think of sin as sin.  You think of it as pleasant or reasonable or your right but never as a temptation when you have decided to power on ahead into temptation.

Do you honestly think Judas Iscariot believed he was doing something terribly wrong and needed to pray about his decision to betray Christ?  Of course he didn’t.  It seemed like the right thing to do and he did not bother praying about the temptation.  When Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom being destroyed, did she think she was doing something horrific and wrecking her life?  Of course she didn’t.  She didn’t bother praying about turning back and looking at Sodom because she wanted to do it and it was reasonable to her.  Of course Judas did not realize the temptation to betray Jesus would wreck his sanity and destroy his life.  Lot’s wife did not consider that by turning her eyes back toward Sodom she would leave her daughters without a mother and her husband without a wife and the three without her would fall into moral depravity.  Temptation is not the sin but it is the entry point into sin.   Going into a bar does not mean you will become drunk but it is the entry point into drunkenness.  An advertisement is not materialism but it is the entry point into materialism.

Your temptation is not always mine and mine isn’t always yours but it is real and if you pray and watch, you can know when you come to it.  At the point of temptation, your will to follow God weakens and your reasons for staying faithful to Christ lose their power to sway you.  Sin makes sense to you and you shut off those voices that try to stop you.  And then sin enters you and changes the course of your life.  How sin affects you and how severely it damages your life varies from sin to sin and person to person.  Yet there are some universal aspects to sin and its effect.  There are at least six signs that sin has corrupted your life with Christ.  1.  You become irritable and your peace fades away.  2.  You lose your way.  You make bad decisions.  The ramifications of how bad your choices are may not show up at once but eventually you will regret what you have done.  3.  Critical relationships become disrupted without a clear cause.  People get upset with you or you with them and you don’t know why.  4.  God disappears.  You don’t see Him at work and you lose interest in Him.  5.  Many times sin damages the normal health of your body. You suffer from pain and sickness brought on by rebellion against God.   6.  You grow increasingly anxious and have a hard time understanding why.  Your anxious thoughts may lead to trouble sleeping and bad dreams.

Temptation is like a mosquito bite.  It may just result in a minor irritation or it could lead to malaria.  Christ said you must do all you can to avoid temptation.  Watch for it and pray you do not enter into it.  How serious are you about living without sin and not letting it wreck your life or the lives of others?  Bend your heart before Christ and ask Him to protect you from temptation.  Pray He will keep temptation from you at this moment and to build within you a hatred for all forms of sin in you.  List the last three sins you know you committed and choose to despise them and confess them to God and acknowledge that they are evil. 

Adam and Eve--Sin Pioneers Concluded

Continued...

A telling side bar to all this is well exposed by the commentators Keil and Delitschz. When Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit, the most critical concern of theirs immediately afterward was not the ugliness of their sin, it was the disgust with their nakedness and perverted sensitivity to their shame. Isn’t it like children to cry more about losing their bike for a day than to shed even the driest of tears for lying? Even for adults it is a universal tendency to care mostly about the punishment of sin and care not even the least whit about the sin itself. It is the getting caught that whips our hearts around, not any anguish about sin being evil. I read once where a writer asked why we so cavalierly toss out the expression, “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.” I understand the grace of God and the largeness of forgiveness but isn’t it true that you cannot really separate out the sin from the sinner? It is not that murder was committed. It is that a specific person committed a murder. A lie is not told as much as a specific person tells a lie. The sin and the sinner are intertwined inseparably just as flesh and blood cannot be taken from each other.

Confession is not picking out levels of culpability. I did some of it but Jane also did part of it. I have longings that make it tough to say “no”. God made me this way so He’s also to blame. The worst part of the consumerism form of Christian faith we have embraced so heartily lately is not the tendency of believers to flit from church to church or ministry to ministry based on personal likes and dislikes. It is the erosion of the “I” in confession it engenders. The focus of American Christianity is now as outward as Adam’s and Eve’s. For Adam it was Eve…for Eve it was the serpent. For modern Christians it is the music, the preaching, the coldness or the members, the flamboyance of the worship, the lack of friends, the too small children’s ministry, the youth program, the distance, the time, the mission statement, the politics. When Jim Bakker wrote his autobiography, he entitled it simply, I Was Wrong. That is a shocking assessment to make for our time. There is nothing in the title about Eve, the serpent or the boring sermons, loud music or limp handshakes that led him to do what he did. Jim Bakker simply said he was wrong. Quite nearly revolutionary for us in the Church. Can those words even come out of our mouths without a stutter? I was wrong.

The psychological tendency is as old as Adam…and Eve. Downplay the bad in me. Accentuate the bad in others. Critique and correct and you can be just as good as you want to be. I was wrong cannot camp with criticism. Peter, when given his charge by Jesus asked the universal question, “But what about John?” Confession is never about anyone but me. I sinned. I ate. I lusted. I lied. I was lazy. I ignored. I was selfish. I lacked faith. I wasted what God gave me. I was wrong.

Take one statement in scripture and ponder it a minute. The wages of sin is death. What does this mean? It means that sin is the worst of poisons. Take a second statement. All have sinned… Let this sink in for a moment. Who is that talking about? Adam thought it meant Eve and Eve thought it meant the serpent. Go to a final statement. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It certainly is pointless to ask what might have happened differently if both Adam and Eve had simply said, “I ate and I was wrong.” That part of the story is over. But the part we have here is where you and I fit into it. It is the part where I say, “I _________ and I was wrong.” You say, “I ______________ and I was wrong.” Nothing about the church you attend, the troubles you have faced or the people who have let you down is relevant when it comes to confession. I cannot go any further down this Christian road until I do the first thing…confess my sins.. “I ___________ and I was wrong.” That is how it is done.

But what happens when we do this very simple thing? There are two benefits specifically. First, God works with us in a different way than before we confess a sin. If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14 NIV) We can spend all day quibbling about what “heal their land” means for each of us but it seems like a very good thing to me. Secondly, confession changes the way our life is going. 1 John 1:9, quoted earlier uses a lovely term to describe the impact confession has upon us. It is translated “cleansed” but has the idea of pruning for the purpose of making more fruitful. Each time we confess our sins, God makes us a bit more fruitful, a bit, if we can say it this way, more Christian and more effectively Christian.

A moment by moment practice of confession does more than just make us feel better about ourselves; it makes us literally better people. Confession was never intended to be a stored up unloading every time we need help; confession is a lifestyle of becoming fruitful and happy Christians. Take a moment. Consider a sin you have committed this past hour. Confess it and admit to God you were wrong in it. There is no magical formula for becoming a fruitful and happy Christian. The way is as old as Adam and Eve and as fresh as your affection for Jesus. Be the first. Say it. “I was wrong”.

Temptation--Continued

...The delay in punishment…death does not come immediately and definitely doesn’t occur when the temptation is working on us, makes temptation a ruthless enemy. If Adam would have seen Eve keel over as soon as she bit into the fruit, he might have thought twice about biting into it himself. Or even Eve, if she felt sick to her stomach as she gazed upon the fruit, she might herself have stopped short. But temptation works in a timeless fashion. The punishment isn’t there for you…all you have is the object of your desire. Tomorrow doesn’t come.

Temptation works at a second level. It rejects the premise that God speaks truthfully. When Satan denied God’s assertion that if Adam or Eve touched the fruit, they would die; he stated emphatically that they most certainly would not die. Temptation is more than a nod at something to do; it is a turning from someone who is. If God is not dependable and His words not trustworthy or more importantly, He isn’t really out there; then who can say what is right and wrong. Temptation is mostly a listing toward what seems good when God isn’t there to make sense of it.

The most interesting part of Joseph’s success at fighting off the temptation of Potiphar’s wife is that he never let go of two crucial parts to the sin he was facing. Potiphar had been good to him and sleeping with his wife would be horrible. Secondly, God was still and sinning against Him by sleeping with her was even a worse thing to do. His retort, when Potiphar’s wife kept pressing in her seduction was, “my master does not concern himself with anything in the house, everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” (Genesis 39: 8 NIV) If Potiphar was merely a shadow image and God just a picture on the wall, then Potiphar’s wife was pretty appealing. But if both existed, then the sin was terrible to contemplate. Temptation is like a drug that makes God go away and everyone impacted by the sin go away. They aren’t really gone, it just seems like they are. Like a child who puts a blanket over his head and thinks no one can see him, so is the one being tempted tricked into believing the temptation has mystical powers. It makes you think God is gone...

Continued in next blog...