Understanding Temptation

The famous writer Oscar Wilde is famous for a lot of quotations. One of my favorites is, I can resist almost anything except temptation.

It's interesting if you go back to the time of the King James Bible. The word temptation had a different meaning than it does today. Four or five hundred years ago, when people said they were tempted, it would be like we would use the word tested today. That was a trial. It was something they were taking a test to see what they would do. Now, when we talk about tempt, we usually mean that it's to a more to do something. In other words, if you're tempted, you are driven, you're drawn to do something that you, well, you think you probably shouldn't do. So they say, oh, I shouldn't have that second chocolate chip cookie. I'm just so tempted. So we use the word differently than the way they used it. It's interesting in the Greek, it can be used both ways. We'll show you how it's used in certain passages, and you can see that it's used both ways. So when we look at the word tempt in the Bible, it can mean that you're given a test to see what you will do. Or it can mean that you're being allured to do something. You're being pulled towards a desire, a wrong kind of desire. Each of us face different kinds of temptations.

You know, it's hard to understand sometimes when you look at somebody's tempt, that they're tempted to do something. You say, well, that's no temptation for me. You know, say, somebody has a problem with alcohol, and they are presented with a small glass of alcohol. And it's an enormous temptation. They have to resist. It's a struggle. I say people in that kind of situation just frantic, trying to resist that alcohol. For other people, it's like, why would you be tempted to do that? I don't even like the taste of it. And I've never been drunk. I don't even like it. Why are you tempted? We don't understand. So some of you maybe don't even like alcohol. You drink a little bit of wine on the Passover, and that's it. For others, it is an enormous temptation to do wrong, because they know if they take that one drink, they're going to get drunk. They're going to keep drinking till they get drunk. So we don't always understand. It's hard to understand sometimes the temptation, that illegal drugs or the misuse of drugs could be for somebody, if you've never had that kind of problem. Of course, we all have our issues, our gluttony. Some people have issues of sex. Some it's hatred. Some it's pride. Some it's a need for power over other people. Some it's just dishonesty. They like being dishonest. Some people, they're always tempted to lie. For other people that love truth, they don't even understand the temptations of the lie. Smoking, coveting. I mean, we can just make all this list of things, and we can make a list long enough that everybody in this room would say, oh yeah, that one and that one and that one is a temptation for me. And then other things on that list will be a temptation at all. Why is it when you have a temptation, something you struggle with? And I've been asked this question many, many times. And I went to God, and I asked God to take it away. How come He didn't take it away? How come it's still there? How come I still struggle? Why doesn't God take away the temptation? Well, we're going to look at temptation today. What it really is, what happens inside us, our minds, our emotions, what we are tempted, what draws us towards it, and does God tempt us? If He does, what's the purpose of Satan tempts us? What is the difference? I've seen people in very difficult situations say, but God promised He would not tempt me or test me above what I can stand, that I can't stand this. So He's broken His promise. Well, let's look at what it means when the Bible says God tempts us. What does it mean when it says Satan tempts us? And what happens inside of us? Now, remember, the word tempt can be test or be drawn towards something. So you can receive a test and not be drawn towards it at all. You can receive a test and actually be drawn towards it, but resist it. You can receive a test and give in to it, and all of it is part of a process. So look at these differences, too. Let's start with James, chapter 1. James, chapter 1. James actually writes a lot about temptation throughout his letter. James, chapter 1. We'll start in verse 2.

My brethren, count on all joy when you fall into various trials. The book of James, to me, is one of the most fascinating books. We went through, all about five years ago, we did a series of in-home Bible studies, and we went through the book of James. I've thought about going through the book of James and a series of sermons. It takes about four sermons to do so, but just this book contains so much practical information. It also contains statements I have difficulty with. You know, count on all joy. Be happy when you have problems in life. Verse 3, you see, what am I? Some kind of personal love's pain? No, he says, this is why you could be happy in your trials of life, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. So he said, when he goes through the difficulties of life, he says, find happiness in it, because it's through these difficulties that you are being made perfect. You are being made complete. The idea is, of course, that none of us are perfect and none of us are complete. We're all incomplete people. Spiritually, we are incomplete. We're born incomplete. And then not only are we born incomplete, we become corrupt.

And so he starts this discussion, which we're going to pick up a few verses later, because he carries it through a lot of different aspects of this. But he starts with, look, when you face your difficulties of life, remember, it's through these tests, these difficulties, that you are being made perfect. God is doing a work through these difficulties. You know, you think about it when you're in school, don't you hate tests? Oh, I would hate tests, especially the night before, when I realized I hadn't really studied and I tried to cram for a test. Okay? And yet, what is a test? At school, all a test is, is a way of measuring how much you've learned. That's all it is. The teachers aren't giving you a test because they want to torture you, or they want you to fail. The teachers are giving you a test because they've got to figure out, have you learned what we've been teaching? So testing is part of the learning process. So James says, when you face the difficulties of life, the tests, the trials of life, he says, remember, this is part of the learning process. How much have you learned? He says, sometimes you have to learn patience, so that's what you're learning. But in all of it, we're being made complete. Go to verse 12 now. Blessed is the man who endures temptation. Now, what's interesting is the word temptation here, and the word test are basically the same words in Greek. Blessed is the man who endures temptation. For when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love him. He says, through all this testing, we are being made complete. Something good is happening to us. We have to endure it. That means we have to struggle through it at times. Let no one say, now this is interesting, verse 13, let no one say, when he has tempted, I have tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. Yet we know the Bible, there's many places that says God tested this person. God tested this person. God tested that person. Yet here he says, well, he doesn't tempt anyone. Well, once again, we're going to have to really understand the difference between the concept of being tested and being tempted. They may feel like the same experience when you and I are going through it, but they're different in terms of what God is doing and what Satan is doing and what's happening to us.

Verse 14, but each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Now, this is a fascinating process. I'd like to sometimes just take the time to go through this process in great detail. You are tempted because of your own desires. This is why, this is why you may not, you know, it may just seem so foreign to you, somebody else's sins. I mean, it's so easy to look at somebody else's sins and say, boy, that's perverted. But somebody else might be looking at your sins and saying, boy, that's perverted. Why? Because we're not tempted. It's not part of our desires. Every one of us are drawn towards sin because that is our particular desire. We have to admit that. Now, if some things are harder than others, it's harder, it's easier sometimes, to get someone coming out of a lifestyle in the world where they've just total disregard for the Sabbath, drinking, using drugs, sleeping around. Sometimes it's easier for that person to come out of those sins than the person who is enticed by pride, the need to be someone special, the need to be in charge, the need for acclaim, or the need to say, I'm never wrong, you know, always be right. Sometimes that's actually harder than the person who's doing it, and it's easy for the prideful person to say, boy, those people are perverted. Not realizing that their pride is just as dangerous as sin is what anybody else is doing. So we have to realize all of us have desires, and they're sometimes different than each other. So the temptation, whatever it is, hits your desire, and the person next to you, it doesn't bother them at all. That's very important to understand in this process. Then verse 15, then when desire has conceived, there is a process in which you decide whether to act on that desire or not. You decide, you decide whether to watch the pornography. You decide, this desire is happening, you're looking at it, you're thinking about it, you decide what to do next. You're the one who decides whether to go ahead and cheat on your income tax. But there's a point there where the desire hits your mind and you're drawn towards it.

Well, I can get away with this, and you're drawn towards it. But once it conceives, once you say, hey, you know what, this is okay. You give yourself a reason why it's okay. Once it's conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. You know, there's something in nature that really helps us to understand it's a physical law about this idea of temptation. And it's a magnet. When my kids were young, of course, we always were doing science experiments. I remember one time I almost, well, I melded a plastic jar. I still don't know how I did that, doing some science experiment with the girls out in their garage. I used to have this giant magnet so I could show them how magnetism worked. And I could take a huge piece of iron. This magnet was big and put them back to each other. And, you know, you move that little piece of iron closer and closer. It didn't seem like anything was happening. And I'd say, no, the magnetism is the beginning. And at some point, you'd see that block of iron move. It actually moved. Wow! You know, there's nothing magic, no? This is magnetism. This is a magnet. It draws iron to it. And pretty soon, you'd push that block, and all of a sudden, by itself, it just, just go right up and just attach itself to that magnet. In Los Alamos, when they were building the atomic bomb, they had these giant magnets. And you actually could only walk. When you walk in the building, they had big painted lines. That you couldn't go beyond that line, because people would be walking along, and they'd forget they'd had their car keys. And they'd get on the other side of the line, and you'd see people fly through the air, and just boom! Bang up against the magnet, and just pull them right up to it. They'd have to shut the magnet down, and they'd get the person off of it.

This is the way temptation works. It is a magnet to the iron, the spiritual iron that is in us.

And it pulls us. It pulls us. At first, it's just a little pull. You know, it's just, okay, I can resist that. But the closer you get, the stronger it gets, until it pulls you in, it has you trapped. This is what he's describing here. So, we have to look at our wrong desires as spiritual iron.

And that temptation is a magnet. Now, that means the less iron you have in you, the less pull the magnet can have. The less iron that you have in you, the less pull it can have.

God has a purpose in testing us. It is to develop us into gold.

You know, there's even analogies of the Scripture about how we are being smelted into perfect metal. You've probably heard the term, test your metal. That's an old term that goes way back into the English term from the Middle Ages, where you had to test the metal. You had to see if the metal was strong or if it was pure. God is constantly testing your metal and my metal to see how much iron is still in it. When your spiritual character is developed to be pure gold, which won't happen entirely until we're changed into spirit beings, as long as you're physical, you're going to have, you're going to struggle with desires. You can't help that. As long as you're physical, there's a certain iron in you. But when you're changed, you will be pure gold. You know how much influence sin will have on you when you're changed? Take a piece of gold and put it up to a magnet and see what happens. Absolutely nothing. A magnet has no pull at all on gold. Gold has no attraction to the magnetic forces of a magnet. I mean, probably they're tiny by inhuman terms, I mean the physical terms, but it's so tiny, you know, it's a meaning thing to us. And in spiritual terms, it'll be non-existent. So every time God tests you with me, every time we go through something and then we say, God, why are you doing this? Now remember, sometimes God isn't doing that, because remember it's our desires that are the magnet. Or, I'm sorry, it's our desires that are, it's the iron that's pulled towards the magnet. So this out here is the temptation, but it's the iron in us that pulls us towards it. It just, we allow that pulling to take place. The more gold we have, the more that temptation means nothing. So some of us, that's why one temptation is so strong to one person, not to the other. Part of you is gold. You have no desire to smoke bare water. Others of you, because of your past, that might be a temptation. You still have some iron in you.

So God always is testing our metal for one purpose only, to see how much gold we have. It's to develop gold. Remember, we read James rejoicing your testing. Well, why? Because it'll make you a complete person. That's why. God's always sifting out iron. He's always draining iron out of us, melting it down. Okay, put you next to a magnet. Nah, that's too much iron. Melt him down again, take some out, put you next to a magnet. This is very important to understand. God never shoves us towards the magnet. God never tries to get us to do wrong. It says here, he can't tempt us. He won't tempt us to do wrong. His attempt is never to get you to do wrong. Ever. It is to see how much gold you have in relationships, how much iron you have. The more we resist, the more he says, oh, this is good. This is good. More gold in this person, more gold in this person. This is really important to understand. So God is never going to try to make you sin. God is never going to try to make you sin. Now, I've had this happen a couple of times where I've had people say, well, yes, it's true. You know, yeah, we've been sleeping together, but it's not our fault. You know, we knew what was wrong. So we both prayed, God, please take away our attraction to each other. And the next time we went out on a date, there we went, we were doing it again. Wait a minute. You asked God to make you a eunuch. And God said, yeah, I'm not going to go that far. You have to learn to resist this. I mean, really what you're asking some guy, be glad God didn't answer your prayer.

Says God's fault because he didn't take away our attraction to each other. No. The problem is you're giving in. There's too much iron in our, in that person. So there's still much of this spiritual iron that keeps saying, I like going towards this magnet. And once it has a hold of you, did you ever pick up a good, strong magnet and a piece of iron that stuck to it, tried to pull it apart? Sometimes, it takes a lot of effort to get that away from that magnet. Like I said, in Los Alamos, they had to turn off the, their electromagnetic magnet. They had to turn off the electricity to get people off the magnet. Because they were stuck there. They couldn't get off. Or they had to cut their clothes off because their belt buckle or whatever was stuck to it. God never attempts us to try to make us sin. He will never put a test on you. You can't resist. God will never give you a test. You can't resist. Because He's there. It's His goal that did it. If we submit, He pulls us away. Now, we have another problem. 1 Thessalonians chapter 3. So, we understand God's rules. He puts us through things.

He puts us through things in order to develop gold in us. You know, gold is found in rocks. It has to be melded down. It has to be sifted. I mean, development of gold is a long, hard process. And then, if you're going to make it into a gold necklace, it has to be worked with, with an expert. It has to work with that gold to make it perfect. So, if God is working with us, He's going to meld us down. He's going to work with us. He's going to keep taking the impurities out. And then, He's going to hammer us until He gets the exact piece of jewelry He wants. But you've got to get all the iron out. You've got to get it out of there. His purpose is your welfare. That's why I say He will never give us something we can't handle as long as we're next to Him. If we're pulled towards it, if we end up sitting, it's because of our desires, not because of God. But here's the other problem we have. Verse 4, 1 Thessalonians 3, for in fact, we told you before, this is a little bit breaking in the middle of a thought here, but I just want to bring out one part of the sentence. We were with you that we would suffer tribulation just as it happened, and you know. For this reason, when I could no longer endure it, I said to know your faith. Paul said, I was having a hard time. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to send you a letter to find out, are you still with the faith? He says, lest by some means the tempter had tempt you, and our labor might be in vain.

The tempter. 1 Corinthians 12 says the same thing. It's Satan. Satan plays by a totally different set of rules. Satan doesn't want you to be gold. He wants you to be iron. He has one purpose only. To point that magnet at you, and pull you just as hard as he can. So, if you develop some gold, he will get a bigger magnet. He says, oh good, God's gotten some iron out of me. Satan says, okay, guys, get a bigger magnet. Get an electromagnet. Get something as big as a house, but we're going to pull that person into the sin. There's the difference. Satan tempts you to destroy you. God tests you to make you better. And we have to understand that in every test we're in. Because we'll blame God. Why is he doing this? We'll step back. The temptation is because of our own desires. And God is refining those desires into gold. And Satan, at the same time, is trying to get you, manipulate your mind, manipulate your circumstances, to pull you towards the sin. And once you get stuck on that magnet, you're stuck in the sin until God comes and breaks the certain... breaks it away from you. There's the problem. Once you're stuck, you can't get off yourself. Once a piece of iron is stuck on a piece of magnet, it can't get off of it. Okay? It's stuck to it. It takes another force to come along and pull it off. Once you're stuck to the magnet, once you're involved in the sin, it takes God to get you out of it. So we have to understand that too. When you're stuck to that magnet saying, God, why did you test me like this? Why did you cause me the sin? And God's saying, I didn't cause you the sin. Your desires caused you the sin. I was there refining you, and you went through sporns, and off you went.

Satan doesn't play by the same rules. You know, you really want to see the difference. All you have to do is go to Genesis. Adam and Eve are in the garden, and God gave them a test. If you want to be in a relationship with me, what did he say? Don't eat of that tree, but you can eat of all these other trees. That's the test. You notice he tried to get them to do the right thing? These are good trees, all these other trees. You got bananas and peaches and apples. Great stuff! Oh man, when you taste this, have you ever tasted the cherry? Try this. Okay, this is God's test, but don't do that. What is God's purpose for the test? To make them better, to make them trust Him. What did Satan say? The old man's lying to you.

He doesn't want to eat this tree because it'll make you like Him, and He wants to be over you and force you down and see the difference. See the difference? Here's the test. Don't do this. Look at all this great stuff. This is better. This is good. I'm telling you this is good. Just trust me on this. Satan says he's lying to you. I want you to do this. Why? Because Satan can get control of them and destroy their lives. And there's the difference. And you and I are drawn towards that magnet. It's something that Satan knew because he says right there in Genesis, he saw and said it was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and desired to make one wise. The three great motivations of human beings. We like to enjoy with our physical senses. We like to eat. We like to touch. We like to feel. We like to see. We like to hear. It was pleasant to the eyes. There was something emotionally and intellectually appealing to it about. That it desired to make one wise. It makes me better. It makes me superior to others. It will make me like God. It will make me like God. That you would pride.

Let me give you three ways, then, to better resist temptation. Three points on how to better resist temptation. First, realize that the test isn't the sin. Remember what we read there in James? There's still iron in all of us. So the magnet comes along. Shoves this big magnet up. You're there, sort of wavering. And God says, well, let me use this to develop gold in you. And you resist. And you haven't sinned. Even though you were drawn towards it a little bit, you didn't go there. You did not sin. You passed the test. The test itself isn't the sin. The struggle is on struggling to resist the sin. A wretched man that I am, like Paul said. But what's happening is, in the struggle, God's developing gold. And finally, He says, get that magnet away from my child.

He protects us as He develops us. So the tests are going to come. Saint knows all of our weaknesses. He's always going to be bringing up this weakness to try to pull you towards that magnet. And God is going to use those opportunities to develop in you perfection. So you're going to have God working perfection in this trial. And you're going to be sweating, saying, but boy, I want to go do sin. And Satan's just going to keep pulling that magnet until there's enough gold here. And God's just going to take the magnet away.

So understand what God's going to do in every trial. And understand what Satan's going to do in every trial. And every time you and I are involved in any kind of issue in life, both are involved in God and Satan. I'm not saying everything is caused by God, because it's not. I'm not saying everything in your life, bad things, is caused by Satan. It is, though, because we live under Satan's rules. So indirectly, everything bad goes back to him. But we do it to each other, don't we? Or just bad things happen. You can't control. Accidents happen. And they're hurtful. And it's difficult. But that's life.

Hebrews 2. Hebrews 2, 14.

This is how you can have joy in your temptations, in your trials. Every time you resist the sin, and it was painful. Every time you went through a difficulty, and in the end you say, you know what? I understand other people better now. Or maybe have a little more patience. Or maybe you don't have as much anger as you used to have. And you're watching yourself be changed by God in these tests and trials, and these difficulties. And you're seeing what God's doing with them. Now you can have joy in your temptations. You can have joy in your testing. Sometimes God come back and says, well, you passed the test. Sometimes he comes back and says, well, you've got to be on this one. Sometimes God gives you the paper and says, you failed this one miserably. So let's work on this.

Hebrews 2, 14. Talking about Jesus Christ, "...inasmuch that as the children have partaken a flesh of blood, he himself likewise shared in the same, that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death that is the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed he does not give aid to angels, but he gives aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore in all things he had to be made like his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, and things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people, for that he himself has suffered being tempted, is able to help those who are tempted." Now, if you look at most margins of most Bibles, it says, tested, because those words are interchangeable. Even though we realize that there's a subtly a meaning that it can be tested, it can be tempted, and depends on the context.

He was tested just like you and I are tested. He was tested. And Jesus Christ always said no to that pull. The pull itself being human. You know, when people got on his nerves, it would have been easy for him to say, God, can I call out the power of heaven? But he didn't. Why didn't he do it?

Because the part of him that was tired and distraught, and just overwhelmed with the emotions, that part of him would have been pulled a little bit towards his magnet. The other part of him that was God said, nah, and always, always, always did the right thing. In doing so, he showed us how to do it. It would be easiest for us to say, well, God, you don't know what it's like. You've never had to live with like I do. But Christ says, you bet I do. That's why I became flesh. So I get to have all those experiences so you have no way that we have no excuses. I showed you how it's done, but you have to be pure gold. Jesus' spiritual nature was pure gold.

But he was physical, so he could feel that feeling, but he was never going to do it.

You and I are the process of being made gold. So remember that the test itself is not sin. It's what we do with it. Do we let it concede, like James said, so that now it brings forth sin?

Fight the fight. Now, I've heard people, you know, you get to the place where I've been fighting to fight and fighting to fight, I might as well give in. I'm so weak. No, if you're fighting to fight, if you're fighting to fight, you're resisting, which means God is developing gold at you. So never get so weary of the fight that you give in. Keep fighting.

The second point, it is God's purpose to replace our inferior metal with the character of His love. Remember God's purpose. So first of all, the test itself is not sin. The pull, the feeling of pull, is not sin. It's what we do with it. And as more and more gold is developed in us, we're actually tempted by less and less things. The more spiritual we become, the less things attempt us. The more we let iron be in our character, the more things we can be tempted by. Secondly, though, that it is replaced then. God wants to replace this inferior metal of iron with gold. And this requires that we submit to this process. You and I must submit to this process every day. Hebrews 12. God will discipline us. Testing is an aspect of discipline. But there's an interesting thing about discipline. Once you learn it, you do it yourself. I remember my teachers, my parents, discipline me by making me remember the alphabet. Right? A. By the way, this is A, A, A. Okay, you know. Over and over and over. You know what? I'm self-disciplined now. I know the alphabet. I can actually read. The thing about God's testing is so that He gets to the place He doesn't have to test you anymore. You now function the way you're supposed to function. It's all about learning. Look what he says here in verse 1 of Hebrews 12. Therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us. So easily draws us towards it and just snatches us and just holds us. And let us run with endurance the race that has set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him adored the cross, despite of the shame, and has set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who adored such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls. Keep looking at the perfect gold of His character, and then we say, oh, well, I could never do that. On our own, we can't. But that's the point of the testing. That's the point of the lesson. That's the point of the studying. That's the point of the lesson plans. That's the point of the practice that God has us do over and over and over again. God is developing gold out of iron. Now, you can't do that in the physical sense, but you can do that in the spiritual sense. You can turn gold and iron until there's no iron left. That's what He's doing. So every time you say, I can't do this anymore, or maybe you fail and you do sin, look at the perfect gold of Christ. And then you say, well, I can't do that. No, but you, God can't. God can't develop in every one of us that perfect gold. That's the purpose of the trials. That's the purpose of the difficulties. That's the purpose of the way of life that we live.

Because all He says, you have not yet resisted the bloodshed striving against sin. Jesus tries to sweat blood. Why? Because He was tempted to get drunk, or He was tempted to go out and commit fornication, or He was tempted to lie or steal, or tempted to worship idols. No, because He didn't want to suffer pain and death. That it would have been sin for Him not to. He would have been sinned for Him not to suffer pain and death. And He sweat blood with anticipation of that. None of us have done that yet. He never sweat blood, saying, no, I will go out. And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks to us as sons. My son do not despise the chasing of the Lord, or the punishment of the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him. For whom the Lord loves, He chases and scourges every son whom He receives. God, if He loves us, is going to teach us not to play in the traffic. Right? If God loves us, He's going to teach us not to drink the Koroks. Is that what you do as a parent? If you love your child, you're not going to let your child play with fire. Spiritually, God is keeping us away from the harmful things, and we keep doing them anyways. And so He punishes us. He rebukes us.

Because He loves us. We have to remember that in our testing and trials. We have to remember that when God sometimes is punishing us. Why is He doing it? He's doing it for our good, because He wants us to be pure gold, because He will not accept iron into His family forever. Only, only people of gold go into the Kingdom forever, who have become like Jesus Christ. But you and I will be fighting the resistance of that magnet to the day we're changed.

And then people say, when will the pulls of the flesh stop when you're no longer flesh? Set that in your mind and say, okay, between now and then, God will have to keep refining me, and I'll have to keep fighting. I'll have to keep fighting the pulls of the flesh. And He says, don't be discouraged by that, because God's going to do His work. God's going to do what He said He would do with us as long as we're willing to follow. As long as we're humble enough to submit, God will do it.

Verse 7, if you adore chastening, God deals with you as sons. For what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you're without chastisement, if you're without punishment, of which all of the account partakers, then you are illegitimate, and you're not sons. Furthermore, we have human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect, showing not much more readily be subject or in subjection to the father of spirits and live. Verse 11 says, Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful. Nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it, to those who have been trained by it.

This is being trained by God so that we no longer need to be punished. It is being trained by God so that we automatically resist. We are being disciplined so that we become self-disciplined. You know, how many times you think about in your life things that used to tempt you. Maybe you were the expert at the, you know, cheating people out of money, and now you wouldn't even think of doing that, right?

There's things you used to do that nobody ever finds out because it makes you sick at your stomach to think, I used to do that. Why? Because the iron's gone. You've been trained. You're now self-disciplined. You don't do it anymore. God's discipline helps us to become self-disciplined. We embedded in his book of virtue says this about self-discipline. He says, self-discipline lies at the heart of the task of successful everyday behavior.

We don't do anything without some kind of self-discipline. You don't get up in the morning to get to work on time. You know, it's like the person that loses job after job after job. Why? The employer has to discipline them because they don't show up on work on time. Then they figure out, hey, when they say be there at eight o'clock, they mean it.

So you go and you keep your job. You like getting the paycheck. So you keep going back. You are now self-disciplined. But maybe a couple of employers had to discipline you first. That's the way it is with God. The more we fight these tests or fight these fights, the more you pass the test, the more self-disciplined you become. And pretty soon, at that particular desire, the magnet has no more pull. Now you have to go on to another piece of iron, okay? Because we are all different pieces of iron. But there are times, there are surely things in your life that are no longer a temptation.

Because you've now become part of your self-disciplined. You become part of a character of gold. He says, this is the center of everything that's successful in life, whether it is controlling our tempers, our appetites, our inclinations to sit all day in front of the television.

Self-disability determines our habits, and they make all the difference. Self-discipline is learned through practice. You practice every day your decisions. We are faced with temptation every day. And the word we just read in Hebrews is training. Training is what? Training in anything is practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.

Any, yes, a good sports team does what? Practice, practice, practice. If you're good at your job at work, it's because you practice, practice, practice, practice. And other people say, how do you do that? And what do you say, I can show you, but you'll have to practice. Oh, I'd like to be able to run that machine. Yeah, I'd like to be able to drive a car just by getting in and driving it. How many of you just got in a car one day and drove it? Well, you practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice to drive a car. And some of us still don't do it very well. Christianity is practice, practice, practice, practice, practice to its self-discipline. Till it's a way of life, it's how you think it's what you do. It's how you face every situation. You know, when I go through this, the main passage I think of is when Saint decided to try to tempt Jesus Christ. Let's go there. Look at that section. Luke 4.

Luke 4, verse 1, Remember who's doing the tempting here? It's Saint isn't testing him to make him better. He isn't trying to train him. He's putting up the biggest magnatee can. He's figured out how to get to human beings. And he's figured out, I can't. This is God in the flesh, but He's in the flesh. I can get to Him. I can pull Him right towards a magnet.

The intent is 40 days by the devil. In those days, He ain't nothing. Afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry. One of the great understatements of the Bible. He's dying. Hunger is no longer an issue of desire. It is an absolute issue of need. At this point, He would be dying. So, He is starting to death. The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread. Come on. If you are who what you really say you are, and you're in this incredible pain, and this incredible need for food, and at that point, even His brain would have been a bit fuzzy.

You know, at this point, you can't sit where you can't see. I mean, everything's starting to break down to the body. The body's digesting itself. At this point, the body's eating itself. It's actually taking all muscle. It's beginning to work on the organs and dissolve the organs for calories. So, that's where He is. And He says, Come on. You're the Messiah. You're the one I used to know that used to be at the right hand of God. Come on. Turn these stones into bread. He knew every human being would normally do that. If we had the power and we were dying, we would eat the food. We would create food. It's at the core of the most central concept of human nature, self-preservation. And God made us to have a need for self-preservation, or we'd all die. So, the magnet here that He's pulling it with, it has to do with the fact that He's starving to death.

Was eating a sin? No. So, this means was the pull of the magnet sin? No. But to eat it under Satan's direction is sin. He can tell the difference. He can tell the difference. And He says, Jesus answered Him, saying, It is written, Man should not live by bread alone, but every word of God. He uses the Scripture as His defense. Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. He now has sort of like an out-of-body experience. Remember, He's still hungry. He's still starving to death. He sees the world, everything, every luxury, all the power, every good thing that's in the world.

And He says, the devil says to Him, All this authority I will give You, and their glory. For this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours. He says, I'll give You the world, everything in the world. Now, this has multiple aspects of temptation in it. It's very brilliant. You know, if you're starving to death, you know, you can have everything you want. And as a human being, it's like I could have all the luxuries I want. I could have all the wealth I want. I could have the most perfect life. But there's also another subtle thing here.

You know, you always feel bad because of the rebelliousness of people. Well, if I give you the authority over the world, you can fix it, Jesus. You can stop all the wars. You can stop all the hunger.

It's a perverted, twisted viewpoint. But to a starving person, you can fix all of it. All you have to do is acknowledge that I'm the God of this world, and it's been given to me. There's another subtlety here. He was the God of this world because, as it says in the Bible, He had been given authority to rule over mankind for a period of time. So He says, I'm the God of this world. All you have to do is say, Satan's the God of this world, and then you can fix it all. First, Jesus knows it was already His. He'd only been given to Satan for a short period of time, and then God's going to take it back. He was His all along. It never truly belonged to Satan. He just gets it for a little while. And so He says to Him, verse 8, Get behind me, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. Then He brought him to Jerusalem and said him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. And then He uses the Bible in verses 10 and 11 as part of the temptation. This is what's very important. But Satan can't get a big enough magnet. He will use the Scripture. He will twist the Scripture to try to tempt you. You have to twist the Scripture. This would appeal to everything, every aspect of human pride. If you are. If you really are. Come on. Nobody believes it. These little, these hairless apes don't believe it. I don't believe it. Prove to me, you know, I'm Lucifer. I'm the greatest thing God ever created. And you are not the word. You're not the logos. It's all a big joke. If you are, just show it to me. Okay. In verse 12, Jesus answered and said to him, It has been said to you, or it has been said, Do not tempt the Lord your God. So let me get this right now. Say, you're going to test God. Let's give him a test. Verse 13. Now when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. It's like, okay, okay, I'll be back. He couldn't think of anything else to do. But he was going to come back an opportune time. I'll get you. When he killed him, he thought he finally had him. When he killed him, he thought he finally had him. I killed the Son of God.

I have finally won this war. Now three days and three nights later, he found out that wasn't true.

The third point is that you and I must learn to identify the triggers, whatever triggers your temptation, and then flee those situations. What we try to do is we mess around with temptation. Oh, I'm just going to get a little close. I'm not going to drink anything. I'm just going to go to the bar with some of my friends, and I'll just have a Coke. Oh, well, I mean, I'm really not going to... You know, yeah, she's my girlfriend, but we're just going to go park on a little lovely place, looking over the city, and we're just going to sit and look and talk about the Bible all night long.

We play. We get as close as we can. And then it's like, well, how did that happen? We've got to figure out what triggers temptations, and we have to run as fast and as far as we can. Remember what that magnet does. It starts doing this to the iron. It just starts moving it. That's when the temptation starts. And that's when God says, okay, let's work here. Let's build you into create this gold so that it doesn't even pull you anymore. It's at this point that we have the stress. But here's what we do. Oh, well, I'm strong. So you just move a little closer. Oh, I'm strong.

And then all of a sudden it goes, and you say, what happened? Why did you do this, God?

The greatest example of this, and you're probably already ahead of me, we won't go there, is Joseph. Potiphar's wife. Joseph had been in prison. Joseph was, at this point, a young man who had spent, well, you know, he was about to go to prison. He'd been sold by his brothers, right? Sold by his brothers into slavery, went through all this time as a slave, and ended up as slaves in this rich man's house. There's no indication he was married yet. He didn't have an opportunity to own anything or be married or have the good things in life. He was a slave. And Potiphar's wife, who I guarantee you, you know, was not some just, you know, toothless hag.

He was like the wicked witch of the west with a big crooked nose.

You know, you see in the Bible, they talk a lot about perfumes. Well, they didn't have deodorants back then. Women who wore perfumes, that was something special. This woman was a very rich, very beautiful woman, and she tried to tempt him. She tried to entice him. And you notice what he did. He knew, this one's bigger than me. This is a big magnet. I'm not going to hang around. Well, I'll show you what a righteous man I am. Go ahead, I can resist.

Good, put your arms around me. It's okay, I can resist. What did it say he did? She tried to grab him. He ran away, and she ripped his clothes off. He was running so hard. Ripped his clothes off. You guys are going to be running pretty hard. He ran away. He understood the trigger. So he ran away. That's the third great point in understanding how to deal with temptation. It is to run away. You run away long enough, and one day the magnet will be there, and you won't be drawn towards it. It'll be, I'm not interested in that. Keep that away from me. I have no interest in it.

So as we know, we're back for the feast. And we have to get back into the world. And we're also going to have to get back into fighting sin.

And we've got to get back to God testing us. Of course, we had some tests during the feast, right? All of us had tests during the feast. But Saint David had tried to get into temptation here there. But we're back in the world. God's going to continue His tests. And Satan is going to continue his temptation. But remember as we go through this, that God promises to finish the work He started in us. It's a promise. As long as we will submit, He will do it. It's a struggle. It's a fight. But He's going to do it. As long as we continue to submit. And remember that through all this, something very important is happening. God is removing the iron, the very thing that the magnet pulls towards it. And He's creating in us perfect character of gold. And when He is finished, there is no magnet that Satan can create that will have any effect on us at all.