Overcome

 It would be both vicious and uncharacteristically cruel for God to expect you to overcome something He knew you were incapable of overcoming. It would be akin to watching one of my children struggling to bench press three hundred pounds. I know they could never do it, but because I insisted, they would try until their energy was spent. I would never do that. I love my children too much to see them struggle with something they could never hope to accomplish. God would never do it, either.

Knowing that God is neither vicious nor cruel allows us to conclude that though we might be tempted, there will never be a time wherein He will allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able. God doesn’t set His children up just to watch them fail. He does not engineer scenarios and situations He knows you will never get out of intact. That’s not how God operates, and His Word reassures us of this.

That’s not to say we will never be tempted. On the contrary, the Bible is explicit in that each one is tempted, and each one, in turn, must resist temptation. It’s a fight we can win if we are willing to fight. It’s a victory that can be had if we are fighting to win.

Although the Book never promises that the children of God will never be tempted, it does promise that God is faithful and will always make a way of escape for you whenever you are tested, tempted, or otherwise sifted by the enemy. Don’t believe me? Well, it’s in the Bible.

1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”

You can resist temptation, you can flee temptation, you can escape temptation, but you can never avoid temptation. It is common to man, and as such, your duty is to overcome it when it presents itself. If anyone tells you they’ve never been tempted, it’s a lie. Even ascetics living in the crags of rocks, not coming into contact with other human beings for decades, are faced with temptation however it may present itself.

Everyone will encounter temptation during their walk because temptation is never chasing after you; it’s always lying in wait ahead of you. You can never outrun temptation in that you can avoid it throughout your life because it is light-footed and will outpace you, so you must learn to identify it when it rears its head and overcome it because you have God’s promise that you will be able to do so.

That whole nonsense about the devil making people do things is just that, nonsense. What the devil does is offer the opportunity to sin, he tempts, and some people give in because their hearts are divided, and their flesh is not mortified. Perhaps if people had the proper understanding of what sin does, they would avoid the beginning stages of it, which is the temptation.

James 1:14-15, “But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.”

This is not a game of semantics that we’re playing here. The Word tells us that the ultimate end of giving in to temptation is death. Temptation is the genesis, it is the beginning of the road that leads to death, and this is why we must resist it and overcome it because we have been given the promise that God will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we are able.

When you feel the tug of temptation, you don’t allow it to pull you the way it desires you to go because you are curious, or only plan on going halfway because the seriousness of the situation and potential for death should keep you from toying with sin, or thinking it a game.

Many a soul has been felled because they thought they could toy with sin or that they’d be able to course correct after a certain amount of time. This far no further becomes just a little more, and before it’s over, dazed and distraught, they wonder how they went so far in such a short amount of time.

It is your duty to identify temptation. It is your duty to resist it, to flee from it, to acknowledge that it can lead to ruination if you entertain it or allow it to grow. God offers the escape, but you must avail yourself of it.

God cannot resist temptation on your behalf. He cannot do for you what you can do for yourself. Far too many put it on God to extricate them of situations that a little common sense would have avoided altogether.

Some people do the equivalent of turning on the gas in their kitchen, sitting at the counter, and flicking lit matches at the burners, then expecting to be saved before it goes boom. Why would they put themselves in the situation to begin with? Surely they were aware of what happens when you combine gas and an open flame. Surely what they expected wasn’t anything good or pleasant.

There are no cheat days with sin and temptation as there are with diets. Even with diets, we all know that a cheat meal turns into a cheat year, but that’s beside the point. The temptation not resisted leads to sin, and sin leads to death. It’s not a matter of staying on the wagon or falling off the wagon; it’s a matter of falling off the wagon, getting run over by it, and being left on the side of the road for vultures to pick at.

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr.