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. 

Certainty

2 Timothy 1:12

Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.

How Do You Know That You Know?

Twenty five years ago our family packed up all we had and moved from New Orleans to

Northern California.  It was a dreadfully long trip but on the way we decided to take some educational side trips.  One of our stops was at the world famous Carlsbad Caverns.  As a child I had looked seen pictures of it in National Geographic and had dreamed of one day going to it.  I had been to a number of caves before; seen stalactites and stalagmites, explored creepy caves and stood in caves with all the lights out deep below the earth.  What intrigued me most about the Carlsbad Caverns were the stories I had read of all the bats in the cave.  I had seen pictures of bats flooding out of the cave but I couldn’t imagine so many bats coming all at once.  When we had the opportunity to stand at the entrance to the cave when the bats all came out to feed in the evening, I was not prepared for what took place.  As if shot from a cannon, just as the sun was setting, without warning, millions of bats in a great cloud of flapping fury exploded out of the cave, covering the sky as if a thunderstorm had come upon us.  For several minutes it was nothing but bats whizzing past until the great host was gone.  It was far more bats than I imagined existed in the entire world came out of that cave and I was struck by how inadequate were the descriptions I had read of the bat exodus from Carlsbad Cavern.  The experience of it went far beyond my imagining.  I was no longer a “doubting Thomas” that something so spectacular was possible as millions of bats flooding out of a cave all at once was possible.

Have you ever had a hard time believing something you were told could be true?  Perhaps a movie everyone is talking about can’t possibly be as good as they say.  Maybe a book your friend is raving about won’t live up to the expectations.  It could be a TV show that you have been told is “so funny” won’t be.  A speaker you have been told to catch on a podcast won’t keep your attention.  A college that has been recommended to you is not going to be as good as you have been told.  It could be that someone told you to move to a certain town because it is such a wonderful place but you don’t think you will like living there.  Maybe you don’t believe that someone’s story about what they did is true.  Have you been skeptical of the hype about a political candidate or of a religious teacher or perhaps all that is promised about Christianity?  Do you have some doubts about what you believe?

Of all the people described in the Old Testament, I am most intrigued by Moses.  He was one of only two people who met with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and he is known by many as the “Great Deliverer” because of his role in Israel being freed from slavery.  He was a man of great passions and yet described as a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3 NIV)  He most likely had a troubled marriage, was a bit self-righteous and like many of us, blamed others for some of his biggest mistakes.  Most importantly, for the sake of our discussion, Moses was not always certain he could trust God.

We are not sure how he came to this conclusion but Moses at some point, before he turned forty, believed God would use him to help his fellow Israelites escape the bondage they were under in Egypt.  His childhood was unusual.  He was born during a tempestuous time in his nation’s history.  The Israelites had settled in Egypt some four hundred years earlier and now were a persecuted people in their adopted land. The king of Egypt became afraid the Israelites would revolt if they continued to increase in number so he ordered that all male Israelite babies be killed.  Moses’s mother put her baby boy in a water-tight basket to try and keep him from being discovered by the Egyptian soldiers and the daughter of the king of Egypt found him floating in the Nile River while she was bathing.  As soon as she saw baby Moses, the Egyptian princess decided to adopt the boy, thus saving him.  Now was this a coincidence that Moses survived the pogrom of Hebrew babies this way?   Was it just luck Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses floating in the basket and when she saw him, loved him and wanted to save him, raising him in her own house and making sure he was educated by the best teachers of the land?  Or was this a miracle and it was God who saved him through Pharaoh’s daughter?  Your interpretation of this fortunate circumstance depends on your point of view.  Those who don’t believe in God would call it a random fluke of life; those who believe in a personal God who operates within our world might say it was God who rescued Moses and prepared him for leadership. 

Certainly Moses had decided something about his survival as a baby and how it came about and by the time he was forty, he had an opinion about God’s existence.  We know he believed God was working through people in normal circumstances of life because when he was forty he was convinced that God wanted him to kill an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite.  The prophet Stephen, in his last sermon lets us in on Moses’s thinking when he came upon the maltreatment of the Israelite.  "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.  He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.  Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. (Acts 7:23-26 NIV)  It did not turn out well for Moses though.  The Israelites did not rally to Moses as their deliverer; in fact they rejected him and it was reported to Pharaoh what he had done.  Pharaoh was furious and word got back to Moses that he would be executed for his crime.  Moses escaped to Midian where he lived forty years as a fugitive.

What is intriguing about this biographical account is the shift in Moses’s thinking about God and God’s presence in the world.  We can understand how Moses could have thought God wanted him to kill the Egyptian.  It was just as sensible for Moses to think the Lord wanted to use him to lead a rebellion against Egyptian domination as it was for him to decide that God saved him as a baby from the fate suffered by other baby boys of his generation.  An atheist might come to another conclusion.  The fact that Moses lived when other’s died was just a quirk of chance and his belief that he was to lead Israel was something he concocted himself or through the influence of friends or family members but there was no God involved in any of it.  This may very well have been the evolution of Moses’s thinking as he developed a new life far from his fellow Israelites and the Egyptian oppressors.   He fell into a very ordinary existence.  He got married.  He had children.  He raised sheep.  He watched his children move through the normal stages of growth.  He looked for watering spots for his sheep and fought off bears or lions that tried to attack the flock.  Moses kept moving his flocks about in search of pastures.  He fought with his wife and made love to her, had interesting conversations with his father-in-law and the other men of the village.  Slowly he gave up on the idea that God wanted him to help rescue his fellow Israelites from slavery.  Thoughts of God may have continued and he might have even led his family in prayers but any vibrant expectancy that the Lord was personally involved in his life gradually faded.  He had bills to pay and mouths to feed and you can’t look to God to do those things for you.  Forty years without any sign of God makes you more of an atheist than you might care to admit.  Not all atheism is created equal.  Some forms of it are casual and incidental; not a well thought through view of life…more a developed disregard for anything personal about God.  Atheism can be a way of life; it doesn’t have to be a philosophy.

As the silence of God continues, our faith in Him wanes and we pay less attention to Him operating in our world.  Disappointment may be the biggest cause of atheism.  Why didn’t God help me with this problem?  How come God doesn’t change my circumstances?  I thought God would get me a job, make my daughter well, save my marriage, stop me from drinking, grant me a pardon.  We don’t intend to stop believing in God.  It just happens as our disappointments and busy lifestyles deconstruct our faith in a personal and interactive Lord.  I am pretty certain it happened with Moses.  His reaction to the burning bush is a snapshot of practical atheism.  God let him down back in Egypt, why should he trust the Lord now forty years later when God clearly was meeting him out in the hills of Midian.

Imagine if Moses continued to sulk when he met God at the burning bush.  What if he had turned around and walked away when the first sign of God appeared to him?  How different our history would be.  How different would have been everything for Moses?  It is a most amazing moment when God comes to us and it really is God.  We can’t perhaps put our finger on how we are so certain it is God but it is God and the moment we know it is God we are either going to respond with anger and disgust over all the wrong we feel He has done us or we are going to awaken, like a child opening her eyes to the morning light, and recognize the love in His call to us.

The Lord told us to watch for Him to come to us.  He means for us to be ready to see Him.  He won’t prepare us for His entrance.  There will be no trumpets blaring to warn us He is near.  He will simply come.  And when He comes it will be as certain to you as a friend entering into your house that He is there.  His entrance may not be logical…it may make no sense to you at all but He will be with you and you will know He is with you and nothing will be the same from then onward.  Micah the prophet recognized that no one else may watch and wait for the Lord to come to them but he would.  But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.  Do not gloat over me, my enemy!  Though I have fallen, I will rise.  Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light. (Micah 7: 7-8 NIV) When the Lord comes, you will be surprised by Him and you won’t be prepared for what He does next with you.  He might speak through you or love someone through you or heal through you.  His presence will be most wonderful and although you may have fallen, like Micah, you will rise.  You will rise above your sin and rise above your hurt and rise above your disappointment and rise above your failure and the Great God of All will be there with you.  Nothing can stop the Lord from coming to you.  You will be amazed and in your heart cry, “That is the Lord.”  Watch for Him!  Look for Him.  Listen for Him.  The Lord will come to you.  Be prepared to meet Him!