“The Source of Temptation”
James 1:13-18
April 13, 2008
Dr. Jerry Nelson
P.
7, Moo PNTC Romans
P.
8, Blomberg, unpublished manuscript
In the 1991 movie “Grand Canyon” an attorney attempts to bypass a traffic jam only to find himself in a very bad neighborhood when his car stalls.
Waiting for a tow truck he is surrounded by a group of young thugs who threaten him.
Just then the tow truck arrives and as the truck driver hooks up the car the young thugs complain that he is interrupting their fun.
The truck driver then takes the leader of the gang aside and attempts to give him the following lesson in life.
“Man, the world ain’t supposed to
work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, that this ain’t the way it’s
supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I
can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you
rippin’ him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.” (Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, 7)
Yes, something has distorted life.
And that something is not just natural disaster or disease.
What most distorts and damages life is sin.
The world doesn’t talk much about “sin” anymore but we all certainly live in the midst of it.
Whether it is on the school playground where children exclude another, in the office where false reports ruin a career, or worst of all, in the home where what ought to be the safest relationships turn out to be the most treacherous, we live in a world polluted with sin.
Last week from the book of James we looked at the trials, the difficulties of life, and God’s use of them to strengthen our faith.
Today we look briefly at what too often happens to us in the midst of trials – the temptation to sin against God and each other.
To
the issue of trials James wrote: 1:2-3 “Consider it pure joy,
my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the
testing of your faith develops perseverance…”
To the issue of temptation he wrote, 1:14-15 “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.”
James says that in the midst of life’s hardships don’t blame God.
And especially, don’t you dare blame God for the sins you commit.
Nate
Larkin was raised in a religious home.
He graduated from seminary and began to pastor a local church.
He was successful in the eyes of his congregation as the
ministry flourished.
Four
years into his marriage, Nate mentioned to his wife that he struggled with
pornography.
When he didn’t mention it again, she assumed he had gotten over it.
But Nate’s
use of pornography, which began in adolescence, intensified over time.
His double life is illustrated, at it worst, by his paying for sex while on his way to lead a candlelight Christmas Eve service at his church.
It was when his wife found condoms in his possession that
she blew the whistle and Nate was ready to begin changing. (From
Christianity Today, March 2008, 34-35)
I can so easily imagine Nate’s thinking:
·
“God made me this way! How can I help
it?”
·
“Why would God give us such a demanding
appetite for sex, if he didn’t intend for us to satisfy it?
·
“I need more than my wife can provide.”
·
“I’m actually being kind to my wife by
meeting my needs other ways.”
·
“If God doesn’t want me to do these
things, he can take away my desire.
But James wrote, “When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be
tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and
enticed.”
To say “the devil made me do it” is
ridiculous but to say “God made me do it” is blasphemous.
Proverbs 19:3 “A man’s own folly
ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the LORD.”
It is not God, it is not Satan, it is not some outside force – it is us.
Romans
5 makes it clear that in Adam we all sinned and we became sinners.
We may have a legitimate longing for pleasure, for
security, for significance or whatever, but we pervert it by consuming others
on the way to satisfying our own longings.
Our evil desires imagine all kinds of “good” outcomes if we do certain
things.
We
imagine how good it will feel, how alive it will make us feel, and the like.
At first we know that what we contemplate doing is wrong.
But the more we mull it over, the less
evil it appears.
In fact as we turn it over in our minds, it begins
to look better and better.
We consider its advantages rather than
its dangers.
Very
quickly, what we knew to be wrong, we now imagine being no big deal.
·
“It is a small thing, it can’t cause much
harm.
·
“I won’t go very far with this thing. I’ll just indulge it a little and then
quit.
·
“God won’t mind, after all, he made me
this way.
Then we
become obsessed with it.
It
becomes, in our thinking, the only thing that can give us the pleasure we seek
and imagine we deserve.
Again we see that our problem is not the tempter from outside but the
traitor within – our own evil desires. (John Owen, Sin and
Temptation, 111)
Then James writes, “after desire has conceived, it gives birth to
sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
The
sin was not in the temptation – we are all tempted.
The sin is when we engage the thought
rather than dismissing it, when we ponder it and savor it.
And doing so, any desire becomes more
powerful.
James describes desire as a parent that gives birth to sin.
And
sin gives birth to the next generation, death.
We’ve all experienced it.
We
entertain the desire and we become increasingly desensitized.
We become dehumanized – living less as we
were designed to live, in giving and loving, and more corrupted until it is
only our own perceived needs that we demand to meet.
Cornelius Plantinga wrote that “We become internally lawless; like some
mad charioteer, we now run our lives with more speed than direction.” (Plantinga, 48)
And
the end of it all is death – death of conscience, death of emotion, death of
relationships, death of the society, and finally the disintegration of the
human spirit.
It is
nothing but the common grace of God and special grace of God that has kept the
human race from annihilating itself long before now.
James 1:16-18 “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and
perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,
who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through
the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.”
All sin perverts what God intended, pollutes what was to be pure and finally kills the very life it pretends to offer.
Today, as some of you already
know, we intend to give our attention to one killer in particular.
The God-given gifts of sexuality and sex have been perverted.
What was intended for good has been used for evil.
As we wrote to some of you earlier, “This perversion of sex
is pervasive in our culture. Sensuality has been unleashed in our country and
around the world, leaving a path of sin and destruction in its wake. Nearly
every week we, on staff, are dealing with the effects of such sin. We can no
longer remain silent.” (GLN
letter to leaders, April 2008)
The issue is pornography.
40 million Americans regularly view Internet pornography
Every second 28,000 people are viewing porn.
20% of men and 13% of women admit to viewing porn at work.
In 1998 there were 72,000 pornographic Internet sites.
Today there are over 4,000,000.
25% of all online searches are porn related.
U.S. annual sales of pornography top $13 billion.
It is $96 billion worldwide.
In a Christianity Today Leadership Journal survey:
· 37% of pastors say porn is a struggle for them.
· 51% say it is a temptation
· 25% of all calls to Focus on the Family’s “clergy care line” were porn related.
And most surveys say that problem is even more pervasive among others, than among pastors.
And this matters to every one of us:
· Average age of 1st exposure to Internet porn is 11 years.
·
90% of 8-16 year olds have seen online porn.
Sources for the above statistics:
2008 Top Ten Reviews
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html#anchor1
August 25, 2005 Christian Science Monitor
Leadership Journal Winter 2005 p8
Pornography touches every family.
Pornography
is shaping and thus destroying relationships.
It affects how every woman in our culture is perceived.
Whether
we are 12 or 92, man or woman, it is, unfortunately, a subject with which we
must deal.
This isn’t just the stuff of mass-murderer Ted Bundy or Law and Order –
Special Victims Unit.
·
This is the stuff of soft-core porn we so
readily watch in many PG13 and R rated movies today;
·
It’s the stuff used by Christian couples
to stimulate their sex lives;
·
It’s the stuff people are surfing on
their computers.
·
It ensnares, desensitizes, dehumanizes
and destroys.
And today we want to say there is something that you can do about it.
By
God’s grace boys and girls, men and women, can be made more aware and some can
be set free from the bondage they are in.
Today we want to address this subject, not crudely but candidly.
To
that end we wish to separate the men and women.
Speaking to the women will be Dee Dee Woodman, a long-time friend of
ours and counselor in our city.
Speaking to the men will be Jason Martinkus with New Life Ministries.
We believe strongly that the message today needs to be heard by everyone
7th grade and older.
I invite all of you to stand with me as the women are dismissed to rooms
177-79.
The audio of Jason’s and Dee Dee’s presentations are available online at
www.sgc.org “soundliving”
Permission:
You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in
any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not
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approved by SoundLiving.org.
Other Sources and Notes:
Books
on the subject of sin:
Cornelius
Plantinga, Jr. Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Eerdmans, 1995
Joseph
Pieper The Concept of Sin, St Augustine Press, Translation 2001
John
Owen, Sin and Temptation, 1665 reprinted 1985
The English words “trial” and “temptation” are taken
from the same Greek word.
A “trial” can become a “temptation” when v14 applies.
Financial hardship can make us question God’s providence.
The death of a loved one can make us question God’s love.
The suffering of the innocent can make us question God’s justice.
(Moo, PNTC Romans, 72)
The same experience may result in perseverance and increased maturity or
it may result in sin and death.
“evil desire” = “any human
longing for what God has prohibited” Moo, PNTC, Romans, 74
1
Peter 2:11 “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to
abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.
The “dragged away and enticed” is probably a way of talking about the
seductive power of our desires. We are enticed like bait on a hook and then
when we swallow it, we are hooked and led down the path.
The “dragged away and enticed” is explained further here in 15.
Desire (the temptation) is not sin but when it has conceived, it gives
birth to sin.
“One can almost envision three generations here: desire as a “parent,” sin as a “child,” and
death as a “grandchild.” Centuries ago
the Venerable Bede suggested that there were “three stages in temptation. The first is suggestion, the second is
experiment, and the third is consent.” Once we reach the consent stage, we have
been carried away by sin, we have willingly left the path of righteousness and
we deserve to be separated from God. Blomberg, unpublished manuscript, 74
Notice the complete absence of “the devil made me do it?” in this text.
Satan cannot make a believer do anything. James places the blame for our sinful
actions squarely and only on our own shoulders.
Demons are sometimes displayed in NT as giving people unnatural power or
unnatural speech but never are they depicted as responsible for the usual human
sins of greed, lust, hatred, etc.
Repentance and changed behavior form the
appropriate Christian response to sin--not blaming God, seeking exorcism or (esp.
in our therapeutic society) blaming one’s upbringing or one’s friends or the
government, and so forth! Blomberg
83
“How, in an age when people sue the restaurant for serving fattening food and the teacher for their poor grades, but excuse themselves for not choosing salads over French fries or for not studying for the test, can we help but not finally blame God for any and every circumstance not of our liking? And if we do, how shall we understand true evil and develop the endurance to handle real temptation?” (Brosend, James and Jude, 47). In Blomberg 83