Sermon Transcript

0:00:13.6

Well, good morning.  Let’s take our Bibles and turn to James 1.  We’re continuing our series in the book of James, titled Putting Your Faith Into Action.  And this morning we’re talking about winning the war within.  We’re talking about, of all subjects, temptation.  Temptation is the common experience of all humanity.  Every one of us in this room faces the temptations of life.  Not one of us, we learned a couple weeks ago, can escape the trials of life.  And in the same way, not one of us is immune from the temptations of life.  In fact, the Bible tells us that even Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness.  Now, maybe you can identify with Frank in the popular Frank and Ernest cartoon.  Frank and Ernest were talking to a priest one day.  And suddenly Frank blurted out, “Why is it that opportunity knocks only once, but temptation bangs on my door every day?”  That’s a good question, isn’t it?  The temptations of life are as varied as the trials of life.  We can be tempted to lie, cheat, steal, and murder.  We could be tempted to gossip, to slander, to speak evil of another person.  In place like Washington, D.C., power and control are unique temptations for some people.  Some people are tempted by food.  Anybody tempted by food here?  I mean, you can’t resist…yeah, a few hands go up.  You can’t resist taking that next bite.  For others, sexual temptation is their Achilles heel.  And still for others, the enticements that come through materialism and consumerism.  I mean, their struggle is they can’t resist keeping up with the Joneses or the Smiths or the Browns or whoever their neighbor is.  That next purchase is what has them entangled and ensnared.  I think it was Oscar Wilde who said it best.  He says, “I can resist everything in life but temptation.”  Now, there’s an honest man.  I like that.

0:02:27.6

Well, what is temptation?  Let’s take a stab at a working definition.  Temptation is the opportunity to fulfill a legitimate desire in an illegitimate way.  Let’s think about that for a moment.  There are all kinds of legitimate desires we have in life, like a sexual desire.  God created us with it.  He created sex.  He fashioned sex.  It’s a good thing within the context of a marriage relationship where God intended for our sexual desire to be enjoyed.  But you take that legitimate desire outside of the context for which it was meant to be enjoyed, and, well, you have all kinds of problems there, don’t we?  The desire for food is a good desire.  If we don’t desire to eat, we’re gonna have some problems, aren’t we?  But gluttony, gluttony is an illegitimate way of fulfilling a legitimate desire.  Somebody else said it this way, that “temptation is the opportunity to do a good thing in a bad way.”  Okay?  I like that.  And make no mistake about it, friends, we can also say this about temptation.  That temptation is spiritual warfare.  It is a war within us, the declaration of war inside of our soul and our spirit and even in our minds.  That temptation.  The apostle Peter, I think, had this in mind when he said in 1 Peter 2:11…listen to this.  He’s writing to believers, and he says, “I urge you, brethren,”…I beg you…”as aliens and strangers.”  He says, listen, this is a strange world we’re living in.  Our citizenship is in heaven, not here, is the implication.  “I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul,” he says.  Is anybody here in the fight of his life or the fight of her life?  Do you feel like you’re losing the war within?  You know, you’re facing temptations every day, and quietly you just feel like you’re toast on the battlefield here.  That you’re not winning the war that you want to win.  You do the things you don’t want to do, and you don’t do the things you do want to do.  You’re losing the war within.

0:04:48.0

Well, be encouraged.  God is on our side.  And He has even promised to us something in the scripture with regard to temptation.  I Corinthians 10:13.  I suggest this to be one of the first places you go to memorize some scripture with regard to temptation.  Let’s read this together.  “No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.”  Temptation is the common experience of all of humanity.  But you need not despair.  Don’t quit.  Don’t give up.  Find the way of escape.  And I need to tell you, it won’t come through the power of positive thinking.  It won’t come by just saying no.  It’ll come by way of the truth.  The truth that will set you free.  That’s what Jesus said, didn’t he?  If you know the truth, the truth will set you free.  And Jesus is the Way, He is the Truth, and He is the Life we have always wanted to live and that we’ve been created to live as well.

0:06:03.4

Now, all of that brings up back to the book of James and our study of James.  And James turns his attention in chapter 1 from the trials of life, now, to the temptations of life.  And as we put our faith into practice, this necessitates a winning strategy when it comes to the temptation of life.  We need to understand temptation.  Better yet, we need to have a solution for temptation and a strategy for it.  And James gives us that in verses 13-18.  He identifies, first, the source of temptation.  And then he identifies some of the stages in temptation.  In a diagnostic kind of way, he’s gonna slow down the process and probably give us more information than we really want about temptation.  And then he gives us a solution for temptation, a strategy for winning the war within that I think has some take-home value for us today.  So if you need some mental hooks to hang your thoughts on this morning, think of those- the sources, the stages, and the solution- as we work our way through the text this morning.

0:07:04.8

First, the source of temptation.  We find James’s commentary on that in verse 13.  He says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.”  James addresses here what we might call the blame game.  You know, in our culture today, we don’t like to accept responsibility for anything, do we?  We like to point the finger of blame at other people.  And sometimes we even point the blame at God.  And that’s why James addresses straight up on this.  He says, listen, God is not the source of your temptations.  Now, some may argue, “Wait a minute, Pastor, He’s the creator.  He created the world and the universe.  I mean, ultimately, He’s responsible for everything we face in this life.  He created the devil, didn’t he?  And if the devil tempts me…  So that lays the blame at the feet of God, does it not?”  Well, let’s be careful with that.  God is the creator of everything.  He created Lucifer, a beautiful angel.  And He created Lucifer just like He created you and me, with a free will.  And Lucifer chose to rebel against God.  And he took one third of the angelic hosts with him.  That isn’t God’s fault just because He created us with a free will.  So you can’t lay the blame at God’s feet.  God cannot be tempted by evil.  It’s not a part of His nature and His character.  He is holy.  He is separate from evil.  And He will not tempt us with evil.  That’s just not His strategy.  Now, the Lord did lead Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  And somebody may ask, “Well, if God is not the source of our temptation, then why did Jesus teach us to pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation, Father, but deliver us from evil’?  Why did He teach us to pray that way?”  And certainly we see in the scriptures that the spirit of God let Jesus into the wilderness, but he stopped right there.  It was the devil who came later and brought the temptations.  God didn’t tempt His own son.  And some scholars suggest that because…you know, in the original Greek language you don’t have punctuation.  Word order is more important than punctuation in the Greek language.  And so when we translate it into English, we have to punctuate.  And that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer might be punctuated this way- Father, lead us, “comma”, and certainly not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  The implication is God would never lead us into temptation, but, Lord, lead us away from evil, is the idea here.

0:09:57.1

So clearly God is not the source of our temptations.  But we love to play the blame game, don’t we?  James is not even going to allow us to say, “The devil made me do it.”  You know, the devil is never mentioned in James’s short treatise on temptation.  Verses 13-18, he never mentions the devil.  Oh, you know, you can add in other scriptures to get a broader understanding of temptation.  And we know the world, the flesh, and the devil is all a part of that.  But James lays the blame squarely at the feet of our own personal responsibility.  He talks about the evil desires welling up within us.  He says that’s the source of our temptations.  But still we say things like this, don’t we?  “If God didn’t want me to eat this fattening food, He wouldn’t have put it in front of me.  If God didn’t want me to cheat on this exam, He would have given me more time to study.  If God didn’t want me to steal from the company, He would give me a promotion, a salary increase, or a better paying job.  If God didn’t want me to have this adulterous affair, He’d give me a better marriage or He wouldn’t give me the feelings I have for this person.”  You see how easy it is to play the blame game and to not accept personal responsibility for giving in to the temptations that come our way.  James won’t let us do that.  He says God is not the source of our temptations.  He’s the solution for it, but He’s not the source.

0:11:37.8

Now, James goes on in verses 14-16 to lay out for us the stages in temptation.  And there are four of them.  Have you ever asked somebody, “Hey, what’s the weather like outside?”  And you get a lesson in meteorology.  I mean, they just give you more than you really want.  James sort of does that here when it comes to the topic of temptation.  He slows down the process.  He diagnostically looks at the steps or the stages that we go through in temptation and gives us some insight into what happens here.

0:12:09.5

He begins with desire.  That’s the first stage.  Verse 14, “But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.”  The NIV says it this way, “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.”  There’s no “the devil made me do it” here.  James lays the blame right at our own feet and asks us to take personal responsibility.  Let’s talk about those desires a little bit.  Remember, temptation is the opportunity to fulfill a legitimate desire but in an illegitimate way.  There are many desires in life that are good and acceptable.  In the Garden of Eden…go back to Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve were tempted and they fell.  It says of Eve that when she looked at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was “delightful to her eyes”, and listen to this, “and desirable to make one wise.”  Now, is there anything wrong with being wise, with being full of wisdom?  Well, certainly not.  In fact, later in the Bible we find Solomon, who asked God for wisdom rather than wealth and personal fame and so forth.  So wisdom is a good thing.  But Eve was tempted to follow a path to wisdom that was illegitimate, to go through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that forbidden fruit.  And her desires ran out of control, and she fell.  She sinned.  And then Adam followed.  And you and I are the spiritual recipients of their spiritual legacy.  We live in a fallen world today.  And every one of us is afflicted by and stricken by a sin nature.  We don’t have to try to sin.  It’s easy.  We’re predisposed to it.  Okay?  But those desire get the best of us.  Now, some of you may be struggling with a particular desire that really is getting the best of you.  It’s a desire you’ve been asking God and praying to God, “Take this desire away from me.  I know it’s an evil desire.  It’s a wicked temptation.  Take it away from me, God.  Just take it away from me.”  And you’ve been praying and praying and praying, and the desire doesn’t go away.  Well, perhaps because it’s a good desire, but the temptation is to fulfill that desire in a not-so-good way.  Or perhaps it’s an evil desire, and some evil desires lodge themselves in our flesh in a way that, well, we might call them addictions.  And those particular desires that become addictive really require a more intense strategy for breaking free.

0:15:11.2

Let me give you a picture of this from the Old Testament.  In the Old Testament book of Joshua we find the Israelites crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land.  And one of the things the Lord told them was go take possession of the land.  Destroy all of the enemies that are occupying the land right now, the Canaanites and the Jebusites and the Manassites…well, not the Manassites.  Those were the…but the Canaanites and the Amorites and the Jebusites and the parasites and the termites, all of those “–ites”.  Okay?  I don’t know.  I lost my ball in the weeds there.  But take possession of the land and drive the enemies out.  And what you find is they did that for the most part.  They went in and did battle with their enemies and drove them.  And they took possession of the land.  But you read about in chapter 15, 16, and 17, you find that some of those enemies were so well-entrenched, they weren’t able to drive them out completely.  In chapter 15 you read that the Jebusites were living side by side with the people of Judah in the city of Jerusalem.  In chapter 16 you find out that the Canaanites…that the Ephraimites could not defeat the Canaanites in the particular area where they were taking possession of the land.  And the best they could do was commit them to forced labor.  And then you had the Manassites, who were unable to occupy the land that they were given totally because, well, again, the Canaanites were in the land and they were too strong to drive out.  My point is simply this.  The book of Joshua is a picture of the victorious Christian life, moving across the Promised Land into the purpose for which God has created us.  But sometimes sinful desires become so lodged in our flesh that they’re hard to dislodge.  They’re hard to win the victory over, and it requires a more intense strategy to break free.  What am I talking about?  I’m talking about a season of prayer and fasting.  I’m talking about a season where you’re meeting with a Christian counselor.  I’m talking about intense scripture memory, where you’re replacing the lies of the world, the flesh, the devil, and your evil desires.  You’re replacing that with the truth of God’s Word.  Yeah, you’re brainwashing your mind.  You’re washing your mind with the truth of God’s Word by hiding it in your heart and fashioning it in your mind.  I’m talking about a time of tough love accountability.  I mean, you may have a particular desire that is just so entrenched in your life that you gotta take a different approach.  Now, Joshua gave the people of Israel some hope by saying in Joshua 17:18, “Though the Canaanites have iron chariots and though they are strong, you can drive them out.”  I love that.  What it tells me is we really can win the war within, no matter how entrenched that particular desire, that temptation, that evil tendency in our heart is right there in our flesh.

0:18:29.7

The next stage after desire is deception.  Look back in verse 14.  James says, “But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.”  Circle or mark or highlight in red those words “carried away and enticed”.  Now, if you’re an outdoorsman, if you like to hunt and fish, you’re gonna love the word pictures that James drops into the text here.  That word (0:19:00.1) “carried away” pictures a hunter who is baiting a trap for a bear or a lion or whatever it might be.  And the word “enticed” pictures a fisherman who is baiting a hook.  Now, the purpose of the bait is to deceive, isn’t it?  But for the bait, the bear or the lion doesn’t see the trap.  But for the bait, that fish swimming around the lake doesn’t see the hook.  And the bait looks good, doesn’t it?  It smells good.  That bears sees the meat and the juices just dripping off the meat.  And after a while, he just loses all sense of his surroundings, and he goes after the bait and finds himself trapped and ensnared.  Likewise, the fish.  I mean, he had no idea when he woke up this morning that he’d be taking his last swim (0:20:00.1) around the lake.  He sees that bait dangling from the hook.  He doesn’t even see the hook.  He doesn’t see the consequences of his actions.  And “boom”, he grabs the bait.  And before he’s able to measure the consequences of his action, he’s hooked and the fisherman is pulling him in.  Dragged away and enticed.  By the way, these stages…in every stage we move through in temptation, it becomes increasingly more difficult to say no, from desire to deception, you know, the slope goes down a little bit.  This is the proverbial slippery slope here.  But from deception to the next stage it goes a little bit further.  But before we get there, I want you to think about this.  The devil owns a bait shop, doesn’t he?  In fact, he owns a franchise of bait shops.  He’s got one placed right around the corner from your house.  He’s got another two or three along your route to the office in the morning.  And he’s got one right around the corner from your office, so that when you go to lunch, you know, he’ll be surely in your path.  And he loves to study your purchasing habits.  He’s got them nailed down, and he’s calling his supplier right now.  And he’s stocking his shelves with just the kind of bait you love.  And the more we stare at the bait, the more deceived we come, don’t we?  That’s the purpose of the bait.  It’s to deceive us.  And the more we linger by staring at the bait, the more deceived we become.  And the more deceived we become, the better chance we have of moving to stage three, which is disobedience.

0:21:54.9

We go from desire to deception, now to disobedience in verse 15.  “Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin.”  Well, let’s just stop right there.  It gives birth to sin.  There’s disobedience.  Now, here’s where the slippery slope becomes more steep.  It’s one thing to move from desire to deception.  Now when we move from deception to disobedience, it’s a much steeper and much more slippery slope here.  “When lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin,” or to disobedience.  And here James changes the word picture from hunting and fishing to birthing a child.  And just like a woman is never a little pregnant, we’re never a little deceived or just a little disobedient.  When sin has accomplished its purpose, when it has accomplished everything that it’s meant to accomplish, when that temptation and that deception is full born in our life, disobedience is just a heartbeat away.

0:23:04.2

But stage four follows in that latter part of verse 16…or verse 15, rather.  “When lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.”  Death.  Now, the wages of sin is still death.  And it was death in the Garden of Eden.  When Eve looked at that forbidden fruit and saw that it was delightful to the eyes, she was staring at the bait.  You stare at the bait long enough, you’re gonna become deceived.  You listen to the lies of the world, the flesh, the devil, the evil desires in your heart.  They became desire to make a person wise.  And when she sinned and Adam sinned, death entered into the world for the first time.  It was never part of God’s plan.  And death in the Bible is always separation from something.  Physical death is when our soul or our spirit separates from our body.  Eternal death is when you are separated from God forever in a place called Hell.  But there’s also relational death that came over Adam and Eve.  Their relationship, their marriage was never the same after that.  There was geographic death.  They were kicked out of paradise, a paradise for which they were created.  Now they’re separated from that.  There’s emotional and spiritual death, a physical death.  For the believer in Jesus Christ who succumbs to the enticements of temptation, oh, we don’t die in the sense that we lose our relationship with God and are separated from Him.  But we do lose our fellowship with Him.  And praise God for I John 1:9, “That if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  That’s a verse that restores the believer in Jesus Christ to fellowship.  The person who is in relationship with God dies, in a sense; that feeling of death comes over us when we have moved from desire to deception to disobedience.  I mean, how do you feel when you have disobeyed God, when you’ve given into temptation again?  That feeling of death comes over, doesn’t it?

0:25:22.0

Well, fortunately, James gives us a solution for temptation or a strategy for it, we might say.  The first is simply this.  Reflect on the goodness of God.  Let’s read on in verse 17.  He says, “Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.”  You might have that verse of scripture memorized, but you never understood it within its context.  Yeah, every good gift, every perfect gift comes down from the Father above.  James…why does he suddenly move to the goodness of God?  He could have given us a solution for temptation by saying, “Let me warn you about the certain judgment of God, the discipline in the life of a believer who doesn’t walk in holiness and purity and wins the war in temptation.”  But he doesn’t do that, does he?  He encourages us to move away from temptation, to flee temptation, by remember the goodness of God.  It was the goodness of God, remember, that encouraged Joseph to say no to Potiphar’s wife.  He said, “How could I do this when the God of Israel has been so good to me and your husband has been so good to me as well?”  The goodness of God.  Chip Ingram writes this in one of his books.  “Every good and perfect gift comes from Him, even the little ones.  God has given us more than we need simply for survival in this world.  He has given us pleasure, beauty, and meaning in life.  Every relationship, every job, every tree, every flower, every moment is a sign of His compassion.  Every corner of your world and every part of your day can remind you of His goodness if you will only begin to look for it.”  What’s James saying here?  He said in the moment of temptation, whatever stage you’re in- desire, deception, disobedience…well, before you get to disobedience, but somewhere between desire and deception- remember, reflect upon the goodness of God. 

0:27:38.4

Now, part of the lie of the devil, the world, the flesh, our evil desires, is that whatever we’re staring at, whatever bait is capturing our attention, that there’s something good in that.  There’s something better in that than what God has for us.  No, every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father above.  And He doesn’t…He’s not good one day and not good the next day.  He’s not a shifting shadow.  You can count on where He’s gonna be.  God is good all the time, right?  He’s not a shifting shadow.  He’s good all the time.  Let the goodness of God motivate you to run away from temptation in the same way that Paul says in the book of Romans to allow that the goodness of God, Romans 2:4, was meant to lead us to repentance.  Remember when you came to faith in Jesus Christ and you were overwhelmed with the grace of God and His generosity towards you and the goodness of God towards you through His son Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for your sins?  You were overwhelmed by that, as well as convicted by your own sin.  But Paul tells us that the goodness of God leads us to repentance.  James would say the goodness of God, let that lead you away from temptation and reflect on that.

0:28:59.2

Secondly is to reach for the Word of Truth.  Let’s read on here in verse 18.  “In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth.”  It was God’s will to bring us into a relationship with Him, to birth us into a relationship with Him.  And He did this, James says, by the Word of Truth.  Remember, we’re not gonna win the war within through the power of positive thinking or by just saying no.  It’s by replacing the lies of the world, the flesh, the devil, and our evil desires with the truth of God’s word.  I am coming back to a spiritual discipline I learned when I was a teenager, and that is scripture memory.  And I’m finding it’s a whole lot harder at 45 to memorize scripture than it was at 15.  But I’m recommitting myself to this discipline, because there are…I mean, every temptation that we face, there is a deception there.  There is a lie.  And we need to hide God’s Word in our heart.  We need to wash our heart and renew our mind with the truth of God’s Word.  We need to give the Holy Spirit the arsenal, the ready-made arsenal, so that when the lie comes in the moment of temptation, He’s got a truth to replace that.  The Word of Truth.  Commit it to memory.  Absorb this book.  Devour it.  Commit it to memory.  Wash your mind with it.  Don’t go a single day with putting your mind through the Word of Truth, because you never know what temptation you’re gonna face that day.

0:30:31.6

And then, finally, remember God’s purpose for your life.  James says, “so that we would be as it were the first fruits among His creatures.”  What’s he saying here?  God has a plan and a will and a purpose for your life and my life.  And every time temptation comes along, it’s an invitation to get off course when it comes to fulfilling the purpose for which God has created us.  And every time we move from desire to deception, from deception to disobedience, and disobedience to death, we get just that far off course from fulfilling the purpose for which God has created us.  Putting our faith into action, friends, necessitates that we have a winning strategy for dealing with the temptations that we face every day.  Let’s take the truth that we’ve learned from James this morning and walk out the door today with a fresh commitment to put it into practice and to win the war within.

0:31:42.2

Let’s pray together.  Father, I thank You so much for Your Word today.  I thank You for giving us this text of scripture from the book of James.  And, Father, there are some here in this place today all across our campus who really are in the fight of their life.  That, if the truth were known, they are quietly losing the war within.  And they’re at a point of despair and they need Your help.  There are others, Father, who are acquainted with the evils of our world but do not have the resources within in the person of Jesus Christ.  They’re like going into battle with a squirt gun because they don’t have a relationship with Christ.  They don’t have the Holy Spirit living inside of them through faith in Christ to even begin.  They haven’t even started this spiritual journey called Christianity.  And so, for some, it’s a wakeup call today, Father, where we cling to Your promise that the temptations of life are common to all of us.  There’s always a way of escape.  You are faithful, Father, and we thank you for that.  But for others, it needs to be a day of salvation where the goodness of God brings them to repentance and faith in Christ and leads them on to a victorious life as well.  Father, have Your way with us today.  We’ve heard Your truth.  Now help us to put it into action, to be determined as we walk out this door today to do exactly what You’ve equipped us to do.  And we pray this in Jesus’s name, Amen.

0:33:40.5

Well, the reality is that we are in spiritual warfare, an unseen battle, an invisible battle.  And you can go into that battle with one of two weapons, a squirt gun- and good luck- or the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.  And you can choose which one.  All of the resources you need to live a victorious Christian life come by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  They’re deposited into your life from day one.  And then we begin to grow in the grace and in the generosity and the goodness of God all of our life.  So if you’re here today and you have questions about what it means to be a Christian, we’d love to talk to you about that.  I’ll be standing up here afterwards, or our pastors are available every week to visit with you, to talk to you.  There’s not a week that goes by that we don’t talk to somebody here in our midst about their faith in Christ.  And if you’re a believer, maybe you need to call our counseling center this week.  Maybe you say, “I’ve got something I’m dealing with that is really lodged in my flesh, and it’s gonna require a more intense strategy.  And I want to take a different route this week, starting today.  A path towards victory, a path toward breaking free.”  Maybe a call to a pastor or to our counseling center with Pastor Jack over there.  But that’s the path you need to take.  Now, go into the world in peace and have courage and hold on to what is good.  Honor all men.  Strengthen the fainthearted, support the weak, help the suffering, and share the gospel.  Love and serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit.  And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ go with you.  Amen.

0:35:44.1