DAILY BYTE
Perhaps you have seen the bumper sticker that reads: “Lead me not into temptation, I can certainly find it for myself.”
The story of the Bible is a story about human temptation. Remember how it all begins in the Garden of Eden - Adam and Eve are a picture of all humanity in their struggle to not choose things beneath them and somehow lose themselves in the process.
Then in the Exodus, the people of Israel struggled to stay true to God and to who God had made them to be. Their deliverance from Egypt was an illustration of a deeper deliverance, God saving them for new purposes. Story after story in the Bible this continues – judges, kings, prophets, disciples – all needing to be saved. Until the story arrives in us, and if we are honest enough with ourselves, we can confess that we too need to be saved – saved from temptations within and without.
The tendency to temptation is a universal human struggle. After all, who doesn’t know spaces of immense personal weakness? Who has never given themselves over to something which really only diminishes them as human beings and as children of God?
I remember an experience I had while driving past ‘Bread Ahead’ and seeing hot trays of delicious goodies being unloaded – doughnuts and more! I decided that it would be God’s will for me to stop and have some if there was a parking space left directly in front of ‘Bread Ahead’. And sure enough there was. On my sixth time around the block, a parking space miraculously came free!
The truth is that we all have a tendency to temptation, and many of us are deeply hurting because of it. In a way, we need to be really tender around this topic because so many may be really struggling, held in the vice-grip of something unhealthy.
Giving in to your temptations may be slowly destroying you, or those around you who love you.
In many ways, it can be like being trapped in the backwash of a powerful sea current. As hard as you may try, you just cannot summon the power you need to swim your way back to shore. You become increasingly desperate, realising that unless a rescuer arrives, you may well drown.
Well, this is the promise of the Bible, not only that God can but that God wants to rescue us: To deliver us from the grip of even the most powerful of temptations.
Philip Yancey writes that he can understand people becoming atheists, but he cannot relate to the need that some atheists today have to trumpet, or evangelise their positions as if it is somehow a good thing. He says that in the rock bottom moments of his life, when his soul is lonely and distraught, he cannot imagine having to face those experiences without a loving God.
Well, the Bible promises us that we don’t have to.
PRAY AS YOU GO
O Lord, I bring before you my strongest temptations, areas of my life that I know bring only destruction to me and those I love. Thank you that you promise to save and deliver me from these temptations, no matter how powerful and alluring they are. I ask that you will do that, and teach me what I need to do to be fully free. Amen.
FOCUS VERSE
Psalm 68. 19-20 NIV
Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior,
who daily bears our burdens.
Our God is a God who saves;
from the Sovereign LORD comes escape from death.
