Temptation
The bible makes it clear that we live on a battlefield which includes temptation:
‘Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.' (Matthew 26:41)
‘And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people’ (Eph 6:18).
‘When tempted, no one should say, 'God is tempting me.' For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death’(James 1:13-15).
Helmut Thielicke said in postwar, occupied Germany ‘There is a dark, mysterious, spellbinding figure at work. Behind the temptations stand the tempter, behind the lie stands the liar, behind all the dead and bloodshed stands the 'murderer from the beginning.'
But temptation itself is not sin – it is part of the battle. Chuck Swindoll: ‘Where there is no temptation, there can be little claim to virtue’.
William Barclay: 'Temptation is not so much the penalty of humanity as it is the glory of humanity. It is that by which a person is made an athlete of God'.
Jesus incorporated an ancient Jewish night prayer into His model prayer:
‘Lead me not into the power of transgression, And bring me not into the power of sin, And not into the power of iniquity, And not into the power of temptation, And not into the power of anything shameful’
Martin Luther was right when he sang:
The prince of darkness grim,
We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure,
For lo! his doom is sure:
One little word shall fell him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Temptation:
‘With irresistible power desire seizes mastery over the flesh. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity, or desire for revenge, or love of fame and power, or greed for money. Joy in God is extinguished in us and we seek all our joy in the creature. At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real; Satan does not here fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God. The lust thus aroused envelops the mind and will of man in deepest darkness. The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us. The questions present themselves: 'Is what the flesh desires really sin in this case?' 'Is it really not permitted to me, yes—expected of me, now, here, in my particular situation, to appease desire?' It is here that everything within me rises up against the Word of God’.
John Piper says that sin, ‘gets its power by persuading me to believe that I will be more happy if I follow it. The power of all temptation is the prospect that it will make me happier’.