Temptation: Springboard to Faith

Ron Block is a musician with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He has written some very encouraging and helpful responses to questions about temptation:

"In Matt 6:13, Jesus says, 'Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.' The word 'temptation' is peirasmos. It means temptation, trial, proving, testing of virtue. Mark 1:12-13 says that the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. He was there forty days, tempted (peirazo) by Satan. James 1:2 says we are to 'count it all joy when ye fall into diverse temptations.' The word, again, is peirasmos.

"So there appears to be a conflict; Jesus said to pray, 'Lead us not into temptation' and James says to count falling into various temptations as joy, because it works endurance in us. Jesus said to the disciples to pray 'lead us not into temptation' and then there is the Holy Spirit in Mark 1 driving or shoving Jesus into the wilderness for the express purpose of being tempted.

"Jesus spoke His words pre-cross; James spoke his words post-cross. The disciples, pre-cross, were totally unable to handle temptation, as shown by their actions when tempted.

"I don’t see a single instance where Jesus flees from temptation in the sense of removing Himself from a situation where, for instance, there is a prostitute, or people drinking and getting drunk (water into wine), etc. Why?

"The typical answer is, 'Well, Jesus was God.' Yes, He was. But He set aside His omnipotence, His omniscience, His omnipresence to become a man. He came here to operate completely and totally as a man is supposed to operate, as a man was designed by God to be. And we don’t see a single instance of Jesus running away from temptation. What we do see is that the Father’s love and power were His refuge; that the Father was His strong tower, His fortress, His hiding place, His rock, and all those other things we sing about on Sunday morning but then forget to access on Monday when we’re tempted by bad drivers or pornography or our children yelling at one another or our bad finances.

"What we do instead is this: 'Jesus forgives me when I sin. But now I’ve got to be Christ-like.'

"We think we’re an independent 'I' that has to perform good and avoid evil.

"So we hit temptation situations . . . let’s say a porn email comes in on our nicely secluded computer. No one will know. A couple of clicks and we’ll be there. So we fall for it. Because we fail to trust Christ in us, through us, as us, and fail to access and live from His power in us, we fall prey to temptation, get in bed with it, and sin. And of course, since we have the Holy Spirit in us, we cannot stand that we did that; we know instinctively that we are made for something so much greater than that.

"So we bolster up our human effort and resolve. 'I got it this time, Lord. I’m going to have my computer in a room where everyone can see it, install privacy software, and have my five accountability partners call me every twenty minutes to check up on me.' We think we’re smart, but then suddenly we’re on a business trip in a hotel room with the porn channel. Who’s going to know? We fall for it, then the next time we’re on a business trip we call the front desk and lock out the porn. But then we wake up in the middle of the night, start flipping channels, and HBO has something that just walks that fine line of film vs pornography. We fall for it. We repent and try again. Our accountability partners are coming down harder on us. We start lying to them, or maybe even worse, we abstain from pornography because of our pride; we don’t want to be embarrassed, so we avoid porn entirely; as C.S. Lewis said, 'The devil laughs. He’s perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he’s setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride--just as he’d be quite content to cure your chilblains if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.'

"God says this whole system is a bunch of hogwash. What He is aiming for is to be our Life; 'The Lord, our righteousness.' Not merely imputed, but imparted. We are partakers of the divine nature, as Peter says. We are reborn as new men in order to be overcomers.

"What is the response, then, to temptation? We replace the little human me with Christ living in me, through me, AS me. That’s what the devil is really dealing with. He wants to convince us that we’re just little human selves trying to make life work on a wing and a prayer. We are, in and of ourselves, capable of producing no thing. Nothing. 'Of mine own self I can do nothing,' said Jesus. But God has rebirthed us as new creations--as creatures in union with the Creator, indwelt by Him, operated and empowered by Him.

"If fleeing from temptation is necessary in the way [that is so often] describe[d], I would have to say it would be in immaturity, and not from a Christ-relying standpoint. It may be that we must do that for a while until we learn we have no power over sin unless we rely on Christ. We can’t run; we can’t hide from sin if we are relying on our little, weak humanity to manipulate, control, and avoid sin.

"As long as we think our power over a sin comes from controlling our circumstances, we will never have power over that particular sin. We will be constantly trying to control our circumstances rather than standing in Christ’s overcoming power and 'reigning in life through the One Man.' We will never know, at least not until it is too late, that Christ was our way of escape from every temptation, every snare of the enemy. We will lose out on the eternal glory of having trusted Christ within us as our righteousness rather than trusting our limited human viewpoint, infected by the satanic world-system.

". . . The only truly safe haven in temptation is Christ. When we rely on Him in us to live through us, as us, the devil’s machinery is turned back on his own head; temptation becomes opportunity to manifest the power and love of God. When we abide in this way during a temptation, the devil cannot stand; he always gives way, and so he is the one who cuts and runs, not us.

"But of course I am not saying that we put ourselves in temptation’s way on purpose. The alcoholic who has recently quit doesn’t need to be hanging out at the bar. It may be perfectly prudent to put the computer in the kitchen for awhile. But after we learn who we are in Christ, and learn to live from His life in us, we don’t need the crutches anymore.

"What we really do need is to have people in our life who speak from that position of power in Christ, and encourage us to trust, rely, abide; we need people to speak faith into our minds and hearts, rather than Law."