Winning against Temptation

Have you ever been simply humming along as a Christian, doing well, when all of a sudden you’re barraged with an onslaught of spiritual attacks? You find yourself facing everything from trials to doubts to heavy-duty temptations.

You wonder what’s happening, and you’d like all of it to just stop. You’d like to find a little foxhole to crawl into. It’s called spiritual warfare, and you’re in the heat of the battle.

As Christians, we need to understand that we will move either forward or backward in the spiritual battle. If we are true followers of Jesus Christ, then we will face spiritual warfare.

We have an enemy, the devil, who moves in relatively predictable patterns. It may surprise you to know that Satan uses the same tactics year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, century after century. He doesn’t really change up what he does.

Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables, said, “A good general must penetrate the brain of his enemy.” Our enemy is the devil, and the Bible says that we need to know about his strategies and deceits. We need to know what he is thinking and what he is up to.

The devil is so cunning because first he fires an arrow at us, and then he condemns us for being hit. It isn’t a sin to be tempted. The sin of temptation is not in the bait; it is in the bite. If you refuse the temptation, you have successfully passed the test. As one person said, “I can’t stop a bird from flying over my head, but I can stop it from building a nest in my hair.”

We need to reject temptation. We can’t stop it from coming into our minds, but we don’t have to invite it in.