Temptation

Good afternoon, everyone. I tried to talk Mr. Holiday into letting me have the day off, because I said I never get to hear a sermon. And I'd like to hear a sermon for once, but he was very persuasive, so I appreciate the opportunity to be. I obviously lost the argument, as you can see. My wife and I, my son, have been up in Cincinnati, and I was doing some TV programs up there. We did two TV programs on Wednesday, and then Darris McNeely came up into two programs on Thursday.

So once a month, we do four programs at a time, is the way the schedule works. And then it takes basically a month to edit the programs. So once again, we're always working on a very small budget, and I'm always amazed sometimes. Well, every time I go in, I'm amazed as I watch the crew work, and all the different people do things, and how many of them are even volunteers. All the cameramen are volunteers that just do it because they want to help serve the church, and took some classes in camera work, and some of the others are volunteers that are there.

They're doing so many things. Of course, the people we have actually running the program, Peter Eddington, Clay Thornton, are remarkable professionals. If you ever walked into their offices and saw the awards they've won, including Emmys that Clay's won, you realize these people know what they're doing. But still, we're in a small budget. We're always on a tight schedule, and we're always trying to do things that seems like the most difficult way we can, and yet we continue to do the programs.

There is some discussion on maybe changing the format of the program, some. I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do in the future. Now's the time to experiment before we buy television time, you know, while we're still on public access stations. We're on now over 180 access stations, public access stations. We're on between 15 and 20 television stations. We have a Beyond Today TV website where hundreds of people come in every single week and watch the program. We're also on YouTube where we post the programs, and we started doing some two-minute commentaries that we put on YouTube.

We put on Google Video. We put on Yahoo Video, and a new site that started a couple months ago called GodTube. And GodTube is nothing but religious programming. We were one of the first programs on that site. It was interesting. Nightline, which is what, ABC? They did a whole segment of Nightline on this new GodTube, and they showed part of one of our programs as what's offered on GodTube, which we were happy to get free exposure from it.

So we continue to... Now, it's interesting whether it's the GodTube or the YouTube or the Google Video. We can count how many people come in and watch it, how long they watch, and they rate it. They put ratings on it, you know. They also leave comments. So we have been cursed by Muslims. I mean, curses have been put on us. We have been attacked by Catholics. Atheists hate our guts. It's amazing. It's amazing how a post of what's only 20 words long can have 12 swear words in it as they describe what we're doing. And then someone will come out of nowhere and defend us.

Someone will come on and say, well, the first time I've ever seen this program, and these people are right on. Problem is, you know, God's going to curse you someday, and so you get these arguments going between people, and they go back and forth and back and forth, and we have to go through and edit some of them because they get pretty ugly.

We leave some of the swear words in just to show what kind of things we're getting, but every once in a while we have to take out some of the comments, but there was a recent one where a Christian and a Muslim got into an argument over one of our programs, which is going on and on and on and on as they argued back and forth.

So it's interesting to get on sometimes and watch this impact, and we sure seem to make people mad. And, you know, I keep saying we're just nice people. We're really, we're just talking, you know, but we see we sure seem to make people mad.

I was trying to decide what to speak on, and Mr. Roger Foster wrote the, or was the main writer for the new booklet on the Covenants. He had two projects that he started a couple of years ago that he's been working on. One is on the Covenants, and the other is on the history of the church in the first three to four centuries, basically approaching a historical overview of what happened to the church in, you know, why the church was a certain way in 60 AD, and in 360 AD, what is called Christianity is totally different. And more from a historical viewpoint of how that developed and what happened, and we've been doing a lot of research on that. He's in my church area, so I've been able to help him do research for the covenant booklet, and now helping do some research for this new booklet. So I'm working on a series of articles that will hopefully appear in the United News in conjunction with the booklet. So I have all this information I wanted to talk about and quote from the epistle of Barnabas, and talk about Gnosticism and the Gospel of Judas, and my wife and her sister were not impressed at all.

So if you don't like the sermon I give today, you can blame the women in my life, and you can go talk to them.

You know, I found that you can blame women for everything if you just find a way to do it. Is it? The famous writer Oscar Wilde once said, I can resist everything except temptation.

Now the English word, tempt, means something quite different than it did four or five hundred years ago. The word tempt originally meant to test something. You could tempt a new set of clothes. In other words, you would put them on to see if they fit. You could tempt a a sword to take and pound it against something and see if it would break or not. But over the years, the word itself has evolved into a different meaning. Now when we use the word temptation or to be tempted, it means to be enticed. Somehow you're being drawn towards something that is wrong, or you're being enticed to do something that you know you should not do.

So that's how we use the word temptation in the English language today. It's why it's interesting if you go through the New Testament, even in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, the word tempt and the word test are usually the same Greek word. But they translate it differently in trying to capture the subtlety of the meaning of the passage. But using the word as we do today, all of us face temptation. All of us as Christians go through our lives on a daily basis, and we're drawn towards something that's wrong. You know, during the day, many times, multiple times during the day, we are drawn to do something that we know we shouldn't do.

You know, sometimes it's as simple as the person who cuts us off in traffic, and we suddenly, you know, we're shaking our fist and had lost our temper, and we're yelling at them. And then you say, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. But you're drawn towards doing it. And all of us are tempted in different ways. Sometimes it's very difficult for us to understand the temptation another person experiences. I mean, if you have no problem with with alcohol, it's very difficult to understand the temptation that the person with alcohol has. You say, well, I can sit and drink a beer, set it down, walk away, and never even think about alcohol for two weeks.

It's hard to understand if you don't have that that issue, how someone can look at a beer.

And the temptation is so enormous. The inner struggle is so terrible as they struggle not to drink that, because if they drink it, they're not going to stop until they're passed out drunk. And you say, well, I don't understand that. I'm not tempted to get sick. I'm not tempted to drink myself into oblivion. But every one of us are tempted in different ways.

The person who is tempted to be envious, and so they work hard. We look at them sometimes, say, wow, there's a good hard worker, but they're constantly filled with envy of what other people have. The person sees themselves as a victim, and they're always tempted to, oh, you have something I want. And so where this person was, oh, they may seem like a perfect Christian, because maybe they don't have a problem with alcohol. But this person is always shading the business deal. This person is always a little bit dishonest, because they're always getting the better end of every deal, because they're always trying to beat everybody so they can get what they want.

It's not as obvious. And yet that person is literally, as they come into Christianity, receive God's Spirit, and begin to realize that's wrong, they struggle with a deep desire to shade that deal every time, to get the advantage every time. And others look at that and say, how in the world do you struggle with that? It's hard to understand other people's struggles sometimes, but all sin is actually addictive. Understand that. I don't care what it is. You know, we look at drug addiction, or alcohol addiction, or people get addicted to pornography. But you know, whether it's envy, whether it's greed, whether it doesn't matter what it is, every sin is addictive. It creates an addictive pattern in us. And because of that addictive pattern, we are tempted to do that. We are drawn towards it. Temptation is a desire to do something that you know you should not do. And yet you actually desire to do it. You desire not to do it, you desire to do it. And there's an inner struggle. And so we can look at the inner struggle, you know, a heterosexual will look at a homosexual and not understand at all that inner struggle to be attracted to a person of the same sex. We look at that and say, I don't understand that.

But you know, it's interesting when you talk to a homosexual and they say, I don't understand your attraction to the opposite sex. I never struggled with that in my life.

Never had that problem.

It's interesting. All of us are mixtures of different habitual sin patterns. And each person is unique in our addictions. We're all addicted to sin in one way or another. And we're all unique in our set of addictions. So sometimes we don't understand the other person's addiction.

And yet it's all very, very destructive. Why is it that when you're baptized, temptation doesn't go away. You have God's Spirit. It seems like, you know, you wouldn't be tempted.

You wouldn't be tempted to break the Sabbath. You wouldn't be tempted to go ahead and tell that lie so that you get the deal, not the other guy. You wouldn't be tempted to be dishonest. You wouldn't be tempted to cheat. You wouldn't be tempted to look at another woman. Why is it after we receive God's Spirit, we still suffer from temptation? Why is it that sometimes when we seem to cry out to God for help for temptation, he seems to be deaf? You know, doesn't he hear our cries? Why is it that some people are tempted to do one sin and other people don't even...that's not even a temptation? I mean, it's even...it's so for it, you can't even understand why they're tempted to do it. Why is it? We need to understand where temptation comes from. We need to understand and answer the question, does God tempt us? I've counseled many people over the years who struggle with, why did God tempt me to do this? Why did God entice me to sin? He knows I have that problem. Why did he set me up for that? Because the Bible does say that God tests us.

What does that mean? How...what...where does temptation come from? How does it work? And how can you and I better resist it? Which is really, you know, what we all want to know. How can we better resist temptation? But first, we really have to understand how it works, how it functions in our minds. First of all, remember, temptation occurs when our personal desires come in conflict with God's desires for us. It's that simple. Our personal desires are pulling us one way, but God's desires for us are pulling us another way. And so there's this internal struggle. Let's go to James chapter 1. James talks about this in a scripture that all of us know very well.

James chapter 1.

We'll start in verse 2.

James says, My brother encountered all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. In other words, this...and that's the same word, by the way, that's translated, tempt, in another place in the book of James. So going through temptation, going through a test, produces something. One of the things it produces is patience, or that can be translated perseverance, the ability to endure, the ability to wait for the right. But let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. And so the purpose of trials, or tests, is so that you can become perfect, lacking nothing.

Now, when you're in school and you receive a test, what is the purpose of the test?

The purpose of the test is so that you will know what you don't know. Right? If you get a 40% on the test, and there's a big F on it, you know, when you're in eighth grade, you get that test, you know I didn't know it. Actually, you knew it before the test, but there was no place to run and hide, so you had to take the test and you had to fail, right? And you said, I knew I wasn't going to make this grade. Or you ever take a test and think you did well in the shock of... I get a D? I thought I knew this stuff. I really thought I knew this stuff. The purpose of a test is so that you can know what you don't know. So that you can now do what? You know, why is it that you take a test and then you take another test and you take another test so that you eventually can get 100 so that you can be perfected? The purpose of a test is so you find out what you do not know, so that you may learn it, so that you may eventually get the grade. That's the purpose of a test. Now, you don't know that when you're a kid. You think the purpose of a test is to be tortured by adults.

But the real purpose for a test is so you find out what you don't know, so that you can learn, so that you can work, you can go after school, you can do tutoring, study better, do whatever you have to do so that you eventually are perfected. You get 100 percent. You get the grade. That's the purpose. Let's go to verse 12 now. Verse 12, Blessed is the man who endures temptation. This is basically the same word.

Who endures testing. But James here wants to show the difference between being tested and being enticed. They are two different things.

Blessed is the man who endures temptation. For when he has been proved, in other words, when he's made the grade, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love him. Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceded, he gives birth to sin, and when sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. That's very interesting here that you have a process.

Temptation comes from inside. The test may come from the outside. The temptation comes from the inside. The teacher may give you the test. Whether you pass or fail the test depends on you, not the teacher. So, tests can come from God.

The desire to go the other way, the pull to go another direction, isn't from God. That's from an internal struggle. And when you look here, you see he shows how it happens. Drawn away by his own desires and enticed. And when the desire has conceived, in other words, there's this struggle in which you know the desires of God, and you know your desires, and you're struggling back and forth between the two of them. And when you have conceived, in other words, when you've said, okay, I'm being pulled this way, this is the way I'm going, even though you may not want to go that way. Right? Everybody is sinned, saying the whole time, what am I doing? Right? So when you're being pulled this way, it conceives, and what happens when it's full grown? Well, first of all, it conceives, it brings birth to sin. There's a point where an action takes place that's now absolute sin.

It's important to understand, by the way, the difference between the letter of the law and spirit of the law. The letter of the law deals with the sin. Spirit of the law deals with the process that leads to the sin. Spirit of the law deals with the process, not the act. Letter of the law deals with the act. So a person can say, okay, I've never killed anybody, I keep the law, hate people, and they've broken the law. But they haven't committed the act, because the spirit of the law deals with this process, in which there's the struggle, there's a conceiving, in other words, you're going to go into this process of following your desire. You do the act, which gives birth to sin, and then what happens? Death is the result.

Destruction. There are bad results that come from this.

So this is important in understanding this difference. In fact, that's why he says in verse 16, James says, Do not be deceived, my beloved brother. And every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation of shadow returning. Of his own will, he brought us forth by the word of his truth, that we might be a kind of first-roots of his creatures. We're back to God's will as being developed in people, who are going then through a struggle between doing God's will and their own will, between following God's desires and their own desires. And so there's going to be testing that comes along.

And we're going to see how we're graded. To understand sin, there's a there is one physical force or a number of physical examples that we can see, but one is the concept of a magnet.

I had a very large magnet, in fact, two very large magnets. I gave the sermon last week in Morgantown, West Virginia, and I had two very large magnets. And my dad, you'd have to know my dad, he and I are always into some mischief. We were playing with them, and we wanted to see what would happen if you took two very large magnets and got them close to each other. Well, they pulled towards each other and shattered one of them, which then shattered all over the desk. And everything it was a very large desk. Everything that on the desk that was now metal was just flying across the desk. My mother came in and just laughed, shook her head, and walked away, because we're trying to, it was just, it was something out of a bad comedy, you know, just metal flying across the room. Anyways, this money clip has a magnet in it and a piece of metal. And so if I take this, and I just let it sit here, there's a magnetic force that actually pulls on it. It actually moves. You can't see the force, but because there's iron, this metal is iron, the magnet pulls on it. If you simply move it a little closer, you can actually begin to feel the pull. It's hard to pull apart when it's together. You pull apart, but it's amazing how this magnet, and I'm actually trying to keep them apart, we'll pull the metal towards it. The closer it gets, the more dramatic, see, it's slow to begin with, but the more dramatic the pull.

When God tests us, He's doing something very interesting. In old English, they used to talk about testing the metal. You know, when they would make a sword or a suit of armor, they'd have to get two knights out there and beat each other. You have to realize knights, they had 60 pounds of armor on them. They usually did not actually stab each other. They beat each other to death, these blunt swords, but they would have to go out of the armor and a sword and a shield, and they would fight not to kill each other because they were both supposed to survive, but they would have to test the metal. If you start pounding the guy and his armor fell apart, the metal wasn't any good. So you would test the metal. Well, God tests us to test the metal to see how much iron is still in us. Now, all of us, through the act of being physical, have spiritual iron in us. And that's not all wrong, and I want to stress that. By the act of being physical, we have the, use this analogy, spiritual iron is. We're curious. That's one of the things that human beings have, is curiosity. Now, that's spiritual iron. There's nothing wrong with it by itself, but how many people have smoked the first cigarette behind the barn just to see what it was like?

Think about it. How many sins have been committed because someone just to see what it was like? Every once in a while, you'll see on the news where some teenager killed somebody just to see what it was like. Curiosity is not bad of itself, but because of our humanity, it's iron, which means it can be attracted to sin. And so God tests our metal, and all of us have iron in us.

Of course, the problem is the more that iron, the more iron we are, so to speak, the more we're attracted. I saw something interesting on the History Channel a couple months ago, and it was about when they did experiments to create the first atomic bomb. I'm going to have to read someplace to find out what in the world they were doing, but they had a huge building. It looked to be about four times longer than this building, and on both sides were these huge magnets. I'm talking about magnets that are, I mean, it's just a wall of magnets. They just look like filing cabinets, four feet, maybe deep, six feet wide, just rows of them. And down between these magnets, there's a walkway with these orange lines, and people were instructed to never step beyond those orange lines. And every once in a while, someone would do it with like keys in their pocket. And they would fly through the air, smack up a kid's head against the magnet, and they would have to come out and, you know, cut their pants off of them, because they could not get the keys off the magnet, because these magnets were so huge. And so they had lots of stories of people flying through the air. No one, as far as I know, had ever gotten killed, but people got injured because they would be walking, and they would step just beyond the orange line, and off through the air, they would fly, because of any little piece of metal that they would have. The magnetic force is incredibly strong with iron. You and I have a lot of spiritual iron in us.

There's a natural attraction to sin. But when God tempts us, He is not enticing us. He does not create the attraction. And that's what's so important to understand. Actually, that's comforting. When we're struggling with something, God is not creating the attraction. In fact, He changes us. He changes our metal is what He does.

We are being made into gold. You know what's amazing about gold? It has no magnetic attraction. Right? Gold.

Gold ring. Nothing. No attraction at all.

Gold has no... I mean, I'm sure there's some measurable, but I mean for our purposes, there's no magnetic attraction of gold. And so it's not attracted to the sin. The more gold we have in us, the less attracted we are to sin. That's why, by the way, there are certain sins your neighbor may have you think is downright weird. And they're looking at you and saying, yeah, I think your sins are downright weird. It's because maybe that part of you is gold.

It doesn't mean there's no iron. It doesn't mean there's no iron in who we are. And as long as we're human beings, we have some spiritual iron in us. Remember, having spiritual iron doesn't mean it's wrong. It means you're attracted. I'll show you what I mean in a minute. There's been a number of times when I have counseled young people who are either teens or in their 20s, who either were married or sexually involved, and come in this devastated state because maybe she's pregnant, or maybe they're... but they don't love each other. They realize this. They... or they're already married, and they realize they shouldn't have got married. They only knew each other two weeks. And you hear this story, and I've heard it enough times. It's an amazing pattern, and that is, we were attracted to each other, so we got sexually involved with each other. So we went and prayed to God that if this is wrong, take away the attraction. And since the next night we were still attracted to each other, we decided this must be right. Which, you know, you talk about faulty reasoning.

Take away the attraction. Well, okay, God says, fine, I'll just have to, what, make you a unique? I mean, what am I going to do to you? I mean, what are you asking God to do to you when you realize what you're asking? But see, what happens is they don't understand the attraction comes from a problem internally. Now, the attraction, as long as it did not become sexual, was not necessarily wrong. You see what I mean? It became wrong very quickly, though, as it got closer and closer to the magnets, until you're flying through the air. What do you think about saying? You're flying through the air saying, how did I get here? You know, BAM! You're up against the magnet.

And, you know, the thought process, and you talk to people all the time, that, you know, they're asking this as, why am I doing this?

Why am I drinking? I know I'm alcoholic. Why am I doing this?

Why am I going into a club on Friday night? You know, into a dance hall on Friday night, which is something I did years ago, and I haven't done in 10 years. Why am I doing this? And yet, they're being just pulled towards that magnet.

So, we have to understand this idea that there is spiritual iron in us. Sin pulls us towards it, and we have to recognize what happens. In 1 Thessalonians 3, let's go ahead and turn there. 1 Thessalonians 3.

And then, I want to give you a perfect example of the difference of God testing us and Satan tempting us. 1 Thessalonians 3. Because Satan, on the other hand, does tempt us. Satan wants to get us to give in to the pull. So, he will create any situation which he can to convince us that the pull is good. The attraction between the iron and the magnet is actually a good thing. 1 Thessalonians 3, verse 4.

Paul says, For in fact, we told you before that when we were with you, that we should suffer tribulation just as it happened, and you know. He says, For this reason, when I could no longer endure it, and what had happened was, he knew that the church in Thessalonika was going to have problems. And so, he had to leave. And he says, It just got to the place I knew you were having problems, and I just couldn't stand it anymore. So, I had to find out what happened. He says, When I couldn't endure it, I sent to know your faith. He says, I finally had to send someone down there to Thessalonika to say, How are those people doing to know your faith and love, I'm sorry, to know your faith, lest by some means the tempter had tempted you, and that our labor might be in vain. Now, God does not tempt. He tests. He tries our mettle and says, Okay, folks, you thought you knew it. You got 70% on this one. Now, you think, Well, what's God going to do? Throw me away? Nobody might keep you after school for a while.

See, God says, I know you are capable of perfection, because He's capable of perfection. So, He's capable of developing that in us.

So, we get a 90, you know, Hey, I got a 95, I got an A on this test. God says, Good. Let's get back to work.

Because He wants perfection. Now, He knows you, and I can't do perfection on our own. He has to help us do it. That's why He's so merciful with us. That's why He puts up with us. That's why when we fail miserably, Oh, I got a 20 on this one. I got a zero. And God may say, Fine, you're going to be punished. You know, here's the stack of books, right? No playtime for the next two weeks.

See, we do that with our kids. No playtime for the next two weeks until next test, and you're going to pass this one. So, you get a 70, and God says, Good. That's a whole lot better than a 20.

But we're working towards perfection here.

So, we'll, you get some playtime this week.

Satan, on the other hand, has a totally different viewpoint. It's not testing us so that we find out how much we don't know, and how much we do know, so that we can grow. He is trying to get us to fail. And the perfect example is what happened in the Garden of Eden. Go to Genesis, chapter 2.

Genesis, chapter 2. And we see here God and Satan and their viewpoint. Genesis 2, verse 15. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For the day that you eat it, you shall surely die.

Now that's an interesting test.

The test is, okay, here's hundreds of trees. Man, did I create some great stuff. Try this one. Here, try an apple. Try a peach. Those are bananas. Mangoes are over here.

I got coconuts. You're gonna be... That's just gonna blow your mind. That texture is amazing. He's got all the trees. Here's all the good stuff. And he says, By the way, that one can't eat that one because you're gonna learn to obey me. He says there wasn't a magical fruit. It was an issue of, you're gonna have to learn it. When I say no, I mean it, because bad things happen, right? You do this and a bad thing happens. Did he try to get them to do it? No. In fact, he said, You do that. Real bad things happen. So don't do it. Let's look at all the good stuff. God directed them to the good. Told them the bad. He didn't try to trick them. He didn't try to get them to do it. He said, Don't do that, because when you do, something bad will happen. Simple test. God always, when he gives you the test, he always tells you... There's nothing hidden in it. There's no tricks involved. You always know exactly what you have to learn to get 100 percent, and you know exactly what will happen if you fail, and failure is described.

Good trees eat. It's great. One tree, it's bad. Don't... You'll die. Your life will be a mess. Simple. That's God. And he encouraged them to do the right, but he gave them free choice. Satan does not want you to have free choice, by the way.

Satan does not want you to have free choice. He wants to control us.

He wants absolute control. God, simply because God...

The more I understand or try to understand God, the more I just... I'm amazed. Here is a being with all that power and all that genius, and he doesn't have to prove himself to anybody. Think about it.

Ah, you opened the Red Sea once in a while. That's just showing off. But you know, overall, he doesn't have to prove himself to anybody.

And he just says, look, here's what's good, here's what's bad. I encourage you to do the good, do the bad, and boy, bad things are going to happen. And you and I are going to have a problem. Now, let's go do the good. And then he steps back and lets us choose.

Satan's not that way. Look at chapter 3, verse 1. Now the serpent Satan was more cunning than any of the beasts of the field, which the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, As God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Wow, God gave you all this stuff. Did he say you could eat everything? Which is a subtle lie to begin with. Of course he didn't say that they could eat everything. The woman said to the servant, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it lest you die.

And Satan says, You will not die. This is a trick. This is an absolute trick.

God's test is very simple, very direct, very honest, very open. What God wants from you and me is actually not that hard. Well, no. It's hard. It's simple to understand.

It's hard to do because why? Because we're iron. That's why.

We're iron. For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open. You will be like God knowing good and evil. That's partly true, by the way. They had only known good up to this point. They'd never know evil. What is the definition of evil? Well, it's doing what God says not to do. And I'm not going to obey God. They had never experienced evil. They didn't experience the negativity of evil. I mean, immediately after the aid, look what happened. They were ashamed. They hid from God. I mean, all these bad things started to happen. They'd never experienced that before.

So it's partly right. You know, most great lies have a little bit of truth in them. You actually know evil. Verse 6, So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that was pleasant to the eyes, and the tree desirable to make one wise, she took its fruit and ate. She also gave that to her husband, and he ate. What we have here is a description of the basis of human motivations. And now we're into really what the whole spirit of the law is about. Understanding motivations. The basest core of human motivations are basically in three areas that get us into trouble. One is good for food. In other words, it appealed to a physical desire. On its own, that is not wrong. I mean, if you leave here today and you for dinner tonight, you sit down and you have a big chicken fried steak and you say, well, that's, well, I don't know, there's a lot of cholesterol in that. So let's, you sit down and you see a non-fried steak and you say, this is good for the eye. This is good for food. That of itself is not wrong.

Right? Eat a 42-ounce steak, and you know, about three in the morning, you're going to know it was wrong. So simply because we have a physical desire does not mean it's wrong. But the magnet attracts it. And she saw it was good for food. And so he appealed to that iron in her. I mean, you can't help it. If you're human, that's iron. So he twisted that, and now it's attracted to this magnet, which is self-destructive. She finds herself flying through the air, smacking up against this magnet.

It was pleasant to the eyes. It appealed to her desire to own things, to possess things, to have things, to see them. So it appealed her. Now, is it wrong to own things? No. But how much trouble in life is from greed, lying, cheating, stealing? Why? Because we want to get things.

And it was desired to make one wise. Just sheer intellectual vanity. We all like to know that we're somehow a little smarter or no little more than other people. It's one... by the way, this is one way that Satan really gets to Christians. Because we know we have the truth. God gave us the truth. We forget who gave it to us. And so what we have is, well, we have truth, but I now have to have truth that nobody else has, because I have to make sure I'm better than everybody else.

And then if enough people know that truth, I've got to get another truth. Not because we're motivated for desire for truth, but we're motivated to be wise, to be seen as wise.

These are three core human motivations.

Physical desire, wanting things, and the desire to know intellectual vanity. And that's where curiosity can get us. These are our three basic core motivations that Satan gets us with with the big magnet. We have to understand that. Now, it can be manifested in a lot of different ways.

You know, physical desire can be just a desire to eat too much. Physical desire can be alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or, you know, all these things that's different in different people. Look at what John says in 1 John 2. 1 John 2. Here John is talking to the church, to Christians, and he's talking to them about following God with a pureness of heart. And in 1 John 2, verse 15, he says, 1 John 2. Do not love the world, or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world is. He said, This is it. This is what you take. All the world, all its glitter, all the things it can give us, all the things it offers us, all the ways our human nature can go in sin. All the addictive habits that all of us can have. And he says, But when you boil it down, this is what it is.

It is the lust of the flesh. She saw it was good to eat.

The lust of the eyes. She wanted to possess it. And the pride of life, it would make her wise, is not of the Father, but is of the world. Here he is describing to Christians, thousands of years after what Adam and Eve went through, and he's still saying, These are the three core things that motivate us, that drive us, that can be manipulated into sin. That can be manipulated into sin.

So how can we better resist temptation? That's what I want to go with with the time we have left here. How can we learn, then, to better resist it? We understand where it comes from, now. It's internal. Because we are human, because there's iron in us, we are attracted to this magnet. And that magnet just pulls and pulls us. Satan brings magnets into our lives. God does not. God tests us to see what our score is, so that we will know what we don't know. It's not for him, by the way. He already knows what we don't know. It's for us. So we can figure out what he already knows. So God tests us so that we can grow. So God's testing always ends up positive if we let it. Always.

Because he's never trying to entice us. He's never trying to get us to do it. He's never trying to get us to participate in destructive behavior. He's just saying, don't do that! I think that's what God says most of the time. That's got to hurt. Why don't you stop it? I think that's what he says all the time. I think he's constantly looking at each one of us and saying, man, that's gotta hurt. Just stop it.

He's not trying to get us to hurt. The test is to show us what hurts so that we can stop. Satan, on the other hand, he gets magnets to us. I mean, he surrounds us with him. So we're just pulled, pulled, pulled to try to get us to do what is wrong. So the first thing is to realize that the test itself isn't sin. Okay? It's how we react to the availability of sin determines whether we sin or not. Remember, sin or the sin is when our desires conceive and then give birth to sin. So when we are in the midst of the struggle, so when we are in the midst of the struggle, we have not yet sinned.

The test is not the sin, or God would be tempting us. He would be trying to entice us, right?

So when you, when something comes along and you're sort of drawn towards it, you have not yet sinned. Because, see, I've talked to people who do that. They struggle with something and then say, well, I just felt like, well, I was pulled towards it. I desired it. So I figured I sinned in my heart anyways. I might as well go ahead and do it. You say, no, no, no.

You know, the magnet is pulling, but you have the ability to pull the other way. You still have the, you're not flying through the air yet, you know.

You still have the ability to stay between the lines.

And just because you're on the edge of one of the lines and the magnet's starting to pull, you can still get into the center and walk between the lines. So the test itself is not the sin. The pull itself, we can resist that. And in doing so, learn and grow from it. And we have not damaged our relationship with God or damaged ourselves yet.

So sometimes we give in too quickly because, oh, well, I've already messed up.

And the way to prove that is to go to Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 verse 14.

Breaking in the middle of a thought here, the writer of Hebrews is talking about Jesus Christ, who is, he's showing is greater than angels. That was a, an idea that had come from Judaism, that he was an angel. And he was dealing with that, that he wasn't just a, an angel, that he was special as the Son of God.

He was a God to make propitiation for the sins of his people. And that he himself was suffered being tempted or tested. He is able to aid those who are tempted. Now see, we have to understand what that means.

What that means is, is that when Jesus Christ, pure gold, became flesh, because he now had a human nature, not a corrupted human nature like we have. He had a human nature. That means there was iron in him.

That means he could feel the pull of a magnet. He never once took one step towards it. That's what's amazing.

Never, ever took one step towards that magnet. Doesn't mean he didn't feel the pull. He recognized what it was.

That pull will lead to destructive things. I'm, I will not go there. The decisions were simple. Mentally, sometimes emotionally, physically, they were, they were difficult. So that means the fact that he could be tempted by something, or feel the pull of something, didn't mean that he had sinned. Because he immediately walked away from it. You know, you, you take this, this magnet, and I can separate them. There's, see, I can't even get them apart. I can separate it, theoretically, enough where I can, there's no magnetic pull at all.

And all you have to do is when there's the feel of the magnetic pull, just move it, and it's not there anymore. That's Jesus. That's what he did all the time. Never did he move this way. What you and I do is sort of, oh, I wonder how close I can get, you know? How close I can get here before that's too late. It's like, I don't want to go there. It's too late.

He never took one step towards it.

So when you and I begin that battle, we feel the pull we have not yet sinned.

It just means there's iron in us. And what it means is we have to do something, which he did every single time. We have to do something, and then we won't get pulled into it. So understand, that's why he says, I know what that feels like, but can't you see it doesn't work? He knew immediately it doesn't work.

He knew immediately never to go there. So he didn't. He never sinned.

Of course, that's when it is when you're a god and you're made of gold, and you're put in an iron body. You know, I'm using an analogy here. You still aren't going to go there. You're just not going to go there. But it is amazing to think in terms of that he actually was able to willingly put himself in a situation where he could experience being uncomfortable. Come on, God never feels uncomfortable. Human beings feel uncomfortable because of the pull of sin.

So we have to understand, first of all, the pull itself is not sin. What we do now determines whether we sin or not, whether it conceives. Secondly, understand it is God's purpose to replace iron with gold.

And you know there's only one way to do that, and that is to go through a smelting process where you are melted down, reshaped, and then your metal is tested. I don't know. That's just the only way you can do it. And when the metal doesn't stand up, he simply melts us down again, reshapes us, you know, and tests the metal again.

So there's no way, there is no way to become gold without being melted down and tested.

That's just the way it is. Once we accept that, though, we can understand that every test is an opportunity to become more gold and less iron. We can be one step closer to that perfection. We can say, I got an 85 this time, Dad. See, we always look at our, we look at everything, we tend to look at everything as a failure, and then we think God's always displeased with us. Well, if last time you made a 65 and this time you made an 85, you know, God said, hey, that's not bad. So I will melt you down again and start, you know, test you again. It's, God's very positive about us, what he wants to do with us. Doesn't mean he accepts anything less than 100 percent, but none of us are there yet, and none of us can until we're not physical. As long as you're physical, there's always going to be a struggle. It's just because you're ironed by the effect of being physical. And so that daily battle is part of what we have to go through. It's what Jesus went through. It's very interesting when you look at what we call the temptation of Jesus Christ, because he was tempted all the time. But when you look at the major temptation of what Satan did to him in Luke 4, let's look at Luke 4.

Luke 4.

1. And Jesus being filled with the Holy Spirit returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for 40 days by the devil. Now, notice the temptation was for 40 days. What we get here is the last part of it. But that's, this was, it wasn't like Satan shows up at the end of the 40 days. For 40 days, he's trying to get him in subtle little ways. And then he says, okay, I've got him set up. He's starving. You know, at this point, he's about starved to death. He's starving. He's alone. Probably just from the sheer, he'd be physically exhausted. See, this is when he gets us. Starving alone, physically exhausted, probably, you know, just from, you know, you get, you go a long enough time without food, you get depressed. That is all the iron of being physical. He hadn't sinned, but he, I guarantee you, he felt terrible, right? He's alone. He's discouraged. He's hungry. He's in pain. You know, we spend the day of atonement. We're so disoriented. We don't even know who we are, right?

He's at the depth of what it is to be iron spiritually. So he figures, now I'll get him with my best stuff. And it's easy for us to look through here and miss the subtlety of the arguments that Satan uses here. They're absolutely brilliant because they hit at the core of human motivation. He still did not understand the divinity of Jesus Christ. He thought I can get at his humanity and twist him around. He says, and the devil said to him, verse 2 says, and in those days he ate nothing, and after when it ended, he was hungry. That's to be one of the greatest understatements of the Bible, you know. And the devil said to him, if you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread. Now, what is he hitting at? The physical desire to eat. Was it sin for Jesus to desire to eat? And no, it wasn't. He was designed to eat. By the way, you're designed to eat. The physical desire to eat is not sin. Why is the physical desire to eat pork wrong?

The United can come up with all the reasons why pork wasn't designed to be eaten, and those are nice scientific discussions. But there's one reason why pork is wrong to eat, because God said so. I mean, I don't know if pork's any wrong within a pot fudge Sunday, as far as chemically. I eat hot fudge Sundays all the time, because God didn't say I couldn't.

You understand what I'm saying?

Pork is wrong to eat, because God said, I didn't design it to be eaten, so don't eat it. That's why it's wrong to eat. Our desire to eat is not wrong. Jesus' desire to eat was... is so intense. I don't think any of us can even understand it, unless you've gone 40 days without eating. His human desire to eat was at its pinnacle. He's desired to eat at this point, as much as any human being has in the history of humanity. Understand that. It's the lust of the flesh, and he says, I got him on this one. He's at the absolute pinnacle of human desire. And I'll hit him there. It's the same thing he hit... he hit Eve with. It's the same thing John said that we're fighting as Christians today. And Jesus answers and said to him, verse 5, it is written, man shall live, not live by bread alone, but by every word of... every word of God. He says, come on, we don't... I don't play that game. When God says, I can eat, I will eat. I didn't come here to die in the wilderness from starvation, so I know he's going to feed me. So when he feeds me, I'll eat. Otherwise, you can't tempt me, but you can't... you know he felt the magnetic pull to eat.

And walked away from me. Just walked away from me. He said, God will feed me when God says it's time to eat, not because you say it's time to eat.

See, notice all this has to do with control. Satan controls.

He wants to control every aspect of our lives so it's destructive.

Then the devil, taking him on a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And he said to him, all this authority I will give you and their glory, for this has been delivered to me, and I will give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if you will worship before me, all this will be yours.

The lust of the eyes. You can have it all. Jesus, anything you want. I'll make you king of the world. You want to be Caesar? It's mine. I controlled Caesar. You want to run the Roman Empire? I'll put you in charge of it. We'll go replace Caesar at this time. Caligula, maybe. We'll go throw all Caligula and I'll put you in. How's that? You can have it all. I think there's something else more subtle here. This is a conjecture on my part because Luke doesn't say it, but I think there's something more subtle here. I think he's actually playing on his compassion. Why wait until you have to come back to fix the world? I'll let you fix it now. That had to be even harder. See, he takes the good part of him and he twists it. You can fix the world now. You know what, Jesus? You can make sure that no child starves today. Instead of waiting 2,000 years to do that, you can do it now. See, I think that's where the real test came from here. I think it came from his compassion. He goes on and says, in Jesus answered him and said, verse 8, Get behind me, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Now Satan said, Okay, I couldn't get to him with the lust of the flesh. I couldn't get to him with the lust of the eyes. Those are two of my three best, but my third's even better. I get more people with this than anything. Simple, pure ego. I will get to him through arrogance, and I will use the Scripture to do it.

Verse 9, Then he brought him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. For it is written, You know, God himself said this, He shall give his angels charge over you to keep you, and in their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against the stone. He said, Now, if you really are the Son of God, you claim to be this, and the Bible says that you're the Son of God, I understand the Bible says you're the Son of God. Just prove it. Now, see, that one I would have, I'd have gone head over heels on that one.

Show you the Son of God! Okay! He said, I mean, I'm, you got to prove something.

And he had no need to prove anything.

There was nothing there for him to grab hold of. There was no vanity there for him to get there. There's just no pride there. He knows who he is. He's secure with who he is. And he has nothing to grab a hold of. And he really thought that was his best shot. And he used the Bible to do it. The pride of life.

The same things he used against Eve. He hit him with his three best shots, because this is the core of what we are. And soon as he took on a human body, as soon as he had to sink through the processes of a human mind, he became iron. And he thought, I can get that magnet right up to him, and I'll just destroy him. And I'll get him with the three motivations of human beings. And he saw all three of them. Verse 12, Jesus answered and said to him, It has been said, You shall not tempt the Lord your God.

Now, when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. He was like, well, I've got to go back to the drawing board. I always have my best shots here. I'll go figure out something else.

But that was what we read through here. We think, well, how could this be a temptation? You know, big deal. These are very subtle, because they hit at the core of not only who we are as human beings, but they hit at the core of who he thought of as God. I get to his compassion. I'll get to the fact that prove to me you're God. Good, prove it to me. I get to him at the very core of both his divinity and his humanity. And he was able to push that away. He shows us how to do that.

A third point, then, is we must learn to begin to identify what triggers temptation in our lives. And each of us, like I said, is different.

I mean, I watched my dad give up cigarettes. I watched what he went through. I was seven years old. I've never smoked a cigarette. Scared the living daylights out of me. I'm not tempted to smoke a cigarette at all. But if you were a smoker, you see smokers, they can not smoke for 20 years. And they'll be in a situation where they used to smoke. And you'll see them do this.

You'll see them do something that is a smoker's habit that's still stored there somewhere in the brain. Or they'll walk in the place where people are smoking and suddenly, like, oh, I could use a cigarette. Now, someone who's never smoked thinks, yeah, that stinks. But I do understand what they're going through. I understand exactly what they're going through. Why? Oh, I have enough addictions of my own. I understand what addictions are. I understand. I understand what they're feeling. And you don't have to have somebody else's sin to understand what they're feeling. Just take whatever your addiction is and put it in there. The process is amazingly similar.

And that's why in 1 Corinthians 6, 18, Paul says, flee fornication. What we have to do is understand the triggers. And you can't say, let me see how close I can get to the magnet. I mean, it is a true force. And with the concept of, I'm metal, but I'm going to show you how close I can get to the magnet when I'm ironed. When you really look at it, it's dumb, but it's what we do.

Because there reaches a point on our own, we can't stop it. We're flying through the air, heading towards that wall of magnets. It's just, you know, how did I get air? You can't help it.

And so we have to, the concept of understanding how this works, understanding then what each of our triggers are, so that when the pull begins, you walk away from it. That's what Jesus did. That's why he never got close. Soon as the pull began, he simply walked away. He took one step backwards and said, hey, I don't feel that anymore, so it doesn't work on me. He just took one step backwards every time. You and I have to learn to take that one step backwards. I won't turn to the scriptures, but there's two instances I just want to bring out in the last five minutes here that shows you how this works. One is Joseph. Joseph, young man, a woman, very experienced woman, he's not experienced at all. And I guarantee you, Potiphar's wife wasn't, you know, something from the circus freaks, you know. I mean, this woman had to be beautiful, probably very intelligent, probably, you know, funny, probably. I mean, she was probably everything that a young man would be attracted to. You know, if she was 103 years old, I doubt if the temptation was very strong. She had to be everything he, a young man, would be attracted to naturally. And what happened when she tried to seduce him? He kept resisting, kept resisting, he kept stepping backwards until she brought the magnet right there. And what did he did? He didn't say, oh, I'm strong enough to do this. Go ahead, baby, put your arms around me. I'm strong enough. Yeah.

It says he ran. She grabbed his clothes. He left his clothes. He ran because he knew, I can't fight this. That's a magnet, and I'm the iron, and I can't fight it. He understood.

He said, boy, he was weak to run away. Nope. He was strong to run away. He understood exactly the issues, and he ran. The magnet no longer had any pull, but at that moment, that magnet was enormously strong. So he had to run. David. David is walking, right, the palace roof. Even today in Jerusalem, you know, you have to do his own pictures, most of the buildings are flat. Homes are flat. The king's palace is higher than everybody else's. Do you think David was walking that night because he was going out to see what woman he had goggle at? No. He was not searching to sin any more than Joseph was. David's walking along. He sees a woman taking a bath. Now, it's interesting in the Bible. Bathsheba does not receive a whole lot of condemnation.

I would guess she was probably a younger woman out taking a bath. That's all this was.

So she was, she wouldn't try to entice anybody. She's on the roof! So why? So nobody can see her. Now, that's a conjecture of my part, but there's nothing in the Bible that gives, it's amazing how little responsibility she's, I mean, she's held responsible as an adult, but the condemnation is on David because David looks at her and for a moment he's attracted to her. Is that wrong? I'm sorry. He's a guy. He's wired that way. He could not be, well, he had to put his eyes out or something. He's attracted. Men are designed to be attracted to visually to women. It's the way their brain's wired. You know? He looks at us, wow! Better get out of here, see? He feels the magnet. Has he sinned? He couldn't help that. He's ironed. He had to walk away. He didn't take a step back. He's like, hey guys, come here.

Always servants come over, wow! See, everybody's lined up, you know?

And pretty soon he says, you know, at this point he knows it's wrong.

But he wants to take a step closer to the magnet. It's like those orange lines in that big building. It's like he's standing on the orange line saying, I can feel the pull, but I want to go that way. But I know it's wrong. Hey, one of you guys, go down and get her inviter up. Maybe she'd like a late supper. You know, she didn't walk in the palace and say, I'm here to seduce you. When she walked in the palace, I'm sure he had a good reason for her to be there.

I'm sure he sat down and fed her and talked to her. And then he seduced you. Because what was he doing? He was fighting in his mind that it's wrong to be there. I mean, he had five other wives, right? It's in his mind. He knows it's wrong. David had to be struggling with it, but he was getting closer and closer to the magnet. The next thing he knows, he's flying through the air and he's up against the magnet.

Now, he could have stopped it anywhere along the way. The problem is, the closer you get to the magnet, the harder it is to stop the process. It's just that way. I don't care what it is. The time, the most opportunity, the best opportunity he had is when he said, wow, at that moment he actually had the opportunity to say, I'm going inside, right? He had it and he missed it. And now he inched closer and closer to that magnet.

Joseph knew that would happen to him, too. Joseph turned and ran away.

Interesting case. Both men of God, both incredible human beings and the way that God used them, both of them men worth emulating, both of them showing here in one case this man ran away and saved who knows how much heartache and destruction in his life. This man didn't, and for the rest of his life he paid a price. Just read David's life from that point on. He paid a price for the rest of his life. And David, though, being the man he was, never blamed anybody but himself. He never blamed her. Never blamed anybody. He just blamed himself.

Should have walked away. I wonder how many times he thought I should have walked away. He said, just turn around and walked away. I had that moment and I missed it. He learned from it. God forgave him. God said, zero on this one, son.

Grades came in. Man, failed this test. We're going to melt you down, beat you up a little bit, recast you, and see what would test your mettle again.

See, God didn't throw him away, but he suffered the consequences. Because remember, when God gives us the test, he always tells us the cost of failure. He always tells us the cost of failure. He knew adultery would reap terrible results in his life. How did he know that? Scripture told him. God told him. We know that we have this perfect person sitting at the right hand of the Father, who says, hey, there's not a magnet you can feel that I don't. Now, that doesn't mean Christ faced every single sin. Christ never had to face cocaine addiction. Why? Because once you faced enough of them, you faced all of them. Because the process isn't that different. It really isn't. The process is that different. It just manifests itself in different ways.

So when it says he was tempted in all ways like us, he had enough pulls, enough different times, enough different ways that he says there's nothing that you and I can't be attracted to that he doesn't totally and completely understand.

We're all not that different in certain ways. It's amazing how different we are. We're all individuals. In many ways, we are really remarkably the same.

So let's renew our fight against that magnetic pull of sin, knowing that we have this high priest. Let's flee the magnet instead of seeing how close we can get to it. Remember what God is doing, so that even when we fail a test, we can be encouraged. We can remember that God is testing our metal, that all of us are iron, that God is changing us and melting us down, and He's changing us into a different metal. And as we go through this process, the promise is that when Christ returns and we are changed, there's no iron left. We will be pure gold.