Show Notes
Life is filled with trouble, as I pointed out last week in our opening message on the letter of James. We learned that we could choose our attitude and learn the value that trials bring into our lives as a source of spiritual growth and development. One of those values is spiritual growth that comes through the trial if we persevere. James even expresses a beatitude or a blessing to those who endure.
“Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord promised to those who love him.” (James 1:12)
Each of us is fighting an incredible battle to destroy our souls. The difference between trials and temptation is simply what is happening within us.
George Stulac explains the challenge during a trial. How are we handling it? Does testing lead to surrendering to temptation to sin? “The Bible says the trial is not the most serious life-threatening factor. The greatest danger to me is not the wrong being done to me, but the wrong that may be done by me. The real threat is that when wrong is done to me, I may be tempted to fall into sin myself.”
Dan McCartney relates how subtle the difference is. “English translations of James 1:12-13 compound the difficulty because English uses different word roots for external pressure to evil (testing) and internal pressure to evil (temptation), whereas the Greek uses only one (peirazo; its noun form is peirasmos). In 1:13, we see a shift from the external “push” to sin to the internal “pull,” and this requires a shift of words in English (“when being tested…’ I am being tempted’”), which obscures the wordplay in Greek. Temptation is, of course, a form of testing…”
The issue of temptation is something we either battle against or give in to. C. S. Lewis, in his book ‘Mere Christianity,’ explains: “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. …We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try and fight it: Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.”
Lewis points out the eternal significance of this daily battle. “People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowing turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy, peace, knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.”
What is at stake? Earlier in the book, Lewis relates: “Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse, so gradually, the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolutely hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.”
Dan McCartney raises the issue that James sets before us. “If God uses testing for the perfecting of his people, does that mean that God is at the root of our temptations and sin? James answers this in two ways: negatively, by showing that for God to tempt someone to sin would be contrary to his very character, and positively, by showing where sin really comes from, the heart of the sinner. Thus, although testing has a positive effect when endured faithfully, there is an unfaithful response to testing that turns it from an opportunity for endurance to an occasion for sin.”
How do we deal with temptations, those inner battles of the soul? James reminds us of a number of things we need to understand to overcome temptation in our lives.
