This may sound quite obvious to you, but you and I are not God. We are human beings and with being human beings we exist with a sinful nature. We are not invincible, we are very susceptible to sin and the doorway to sin is temptation. And it’s important that us as Christians or us as human beings understand not just the consequences of sin that it is eternal death, but prior to sin is this trick that Satan uses called temptation.
You and I as human beings are often times not strong enough to fight this temptation and so we should not flirt with it to begin with, we should not play around with temptation to begin with, and here is what I mean by that as an example; my mother for example, when my brothers and I were watching television and we watched soccer games growing up. My mom was very adamant about turning off the tv during the advertisement so whether it was half time or whether it was a commercial she would make sure to block the picture on the tv screen to make sure my brothers and I from very early age would not see anything inappropriate.
In another words what she was blocking us from wasn’t the advertisement, it wasn’t the half time show, she was in fact blocking us from this thing called temptation. She was blocking us from this thing called temptation because she knew that temptation was the doorway to sin. She was trying to not prevent us just from watching the tv. It was much more than that. She was trying to prevent us from sinning as boys. And so, my mother did as much she could to prevent us from even been tempted to begin with the only person that is ever withstood any temptation thrown at that individual is Jesus himself.
Jesus was tempted in the wilderness not by tv screen not by different girls, but he was tempted by Satan himself. Satan himself came to Jesus. And Jesus was able to withstand Satan’s temptation. And as we look to Jesus as the model for how He overcome temptation we too are put that into practice what did Jesus use. Jesus used the scripture, Jesus use the word, for every temptation Satan gave to Jesus, Jesus responded with; “it is written”.
Jesus defeated the door of temptation with scripture. So whatever temptation you are facing today or whatever temptation you will face in the future, prepare yourself, know that you are human and then know the Word of God. For knowing those two things are great tools and great resources for how you can avoid temptation and avoid sin altogether.
Pastor Anthony Santiago