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Choose to Be Victorious Over Temptation

No biblical passage with which I am familiar uses the words “victorious” and “temptation” in the same sentence. Yet, through other expressions, Christians are challenged over and over to be victorious over temptation, so that is the shorthand I’ll use today as I talk about this important area of choice in the life of the believer.

Paul makes it clear that the follower of the Lord Jesus Christ shouldn’t behave according to the dictates of the surrounding culture. In the time when Paul lived, most of the big cities were famous for their depravity. Paul challenged the Romans with these words: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:13-14 ESV).

Here, he not only warns against specific sins which were and are all too common, he provides some helpful advice. Note the kinds of sin he highlights: orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality, sensuality, quarreling and jealousy. What catches me off guard is the inclusion of the last two with the earlier four.

Often Christians who take pride in their strength in standing against the “moral sins” come crashing down in the area of the “spiritual sins.” Before God, one is not to be preferred over the other. Socially, we distinguish. Spiritually, God does not. I don’t know where your temptations lie. They might be in the moral sin category and from time to time, we probably all experience this kind of temptation. One thing I’m prepared to promise you is that more Christians wallow in spiritual sins like quarreling, jealousy, envy, pride, hatred, partiality and so on. To our shame, we sometimes use scripture to justify such things.

To avoid succumbing to the dominating influence of these sins, Paul offers two antidotes. He phrases the first positively, challenging believers to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” This figure of speech which is linked to dressing oneself is rather foreign to our culture. The idea that Paul is putting forward is that we are to internalize Christ’s principles, to imitate His example, to be subject to His Spirit, in other words, to become like Him. In a sense, this part of the equation is in the Lord’s domain. We sometimes call this process sanctification.

Paul adds a second aspect in his charge to believers which he phrases negatively, saying, “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” I’ve been thinking about what this means. The idea of “provision” is “preparation.” Preparation suggests intentionality in some way. It might be the idea of preparing to do something specific, like “I’m preparing to do my taxes.” This means I’m gathering all of the documents, summarizing the financial transactions of the last year, getting the appropriate tax form and setting aside the time to fill out that form and submit it.

We should not prepare to sin in this way. While at one level we claim to love holiness, on another, we prepare to sin. It might be asking a tradesman a leading question to see if he’ll accept cash to avoid paying the tax I was just talking about. It might mean setting your internet browser so that you might “accidently” bump into some pornographic images. It might mean calculating the time needed to get somewhere in your car so that you will be required to drive well over the speed limit to do it. It might mean going somewhere where a special someone is likely to be so that you can deepen an illegitimate emotional attachment. It might mean just about anything, but not quite everything.

There’s another kind of preparation to sin which we must guard against. This is mental preparation. What I have in mind is revealed by the way we use the expression “I’m prepared to go along with them.” We say that when we mean, that while we might not be fully sympathetic to whatever it is that “they” might ask us to do, we have prepared ourselves psychologically to do so.

Even Christians can argue themselves into the position of accepting sin, especially those spiritual sins. This is another way we prepare to sin. It might be allowing a feeling of superiority over another individual or group to take root in our heart. It might be justifying feelings of envy because we feel that we deserve what the other has. It might be convincing ourselves that “just this once” won’t matter because no one else will be hurt; probably not even find out. It might be privately gloating over the apparent misfortune of someone you feels deserves what he or she got.

Before we quit, let me suggest that you think about what I call “systemic sin” in relation to this. Every culture I know grades sin in one way or another. Some are seen as worse than another. Be on the lookout for those things about which you feel a little uneasy in your most spiritually sensitive moments, but which everyone around you asserts is “no big deal.”

This is starting to feel rather negative. That’s another way we prepare to sin: by thinking about how strong it is and that we’ll never be able to overcome its power to tempt us. So let’s close with a couple of assurances that the victory is already ours. Paul wrote “thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1Co 15:57). John wrote “whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith” (1Jo 5:4 )

Thank God that our spiritual victory doesn’t depend on us, but on the One who saved us in the first place.

Ron Hughes
© March 2009