Temptation: A Transformative Battlefield

A friend asked me about "temptation" - here is the beginning of my response: 

Dear Friend,

You’ve asked me about temptation; a subject I wish someone had talked to me about when I was a young Christian.  A subject I wish someone had talked to me about when I was a middle-aged Christian. Come to think of it, a subject I wish brothers (and sisters) would talk about now that I am an older Christian.  You get the idea.

I think it was Oswald Chambers who said to the effect, “A Christian wakes up every morning on a battlefield.” This is not a bad thing when we consider that we are engaged in a war of liberation (Isaiah 42:1 – 7; Matthew 10:1 – 8). In this war we are being transformed into the image of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29). We might say that we are on a transformative battlefield. On the one hand we wrestle with the enemy (Ephesians 6:10ff; 2 Corinthians 10:3 – 6), and on the other hand our heavenly Potter molds us into the image of His Son as we encounter pressures within and without (2 Corinthians 1:8ff; 7:5).

When professing-Christians say that they are seldom tempted, I wonder whether they have become desensitized to sin, especially the sin of “self” – the gravitational pull of who we are outside of Jesus Christ. To be sure I think I have known saints who live in the age to come more than they live in this present evil time, and I do not doubt that their lives are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) in a wonderful fashion. However, let us remember the agony of our Lord Jesus in the Garden on the night of His betrayal – was He tempted to forego the Cup? I cannot understand that mystery, but I think it is wise to keep our Lord Jesus in Gethsemane before me.

I am also reminded of a Peanuts comic strip in which Charlie Brown is talking to Linus after playing another season of football. Charlie Brown says something like this:

“Just once I wish I was enough of a threat for the opposition to double-team me.”

What about us? If we are a threat to the enemy, then we can expect to be doubled-teamed. If the enemy sees us as threatening, by God’s grace, to liberate others with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then we can anticipate opposition – we may be double-teamed or triple-teamed or worse. The enemy may use plays he has used before, but he may also devise snares which we cannot initially see and understand.

This brings us to a tension when thinking about temptation; we’ll call it the way of negation and the way of affirmation. This is a classical way of understanding the dynamic of saying “no” to temptation and sin and self while saying “yes” to Jesus Christ. Think of it as a bungee cord with one end hooked to reckoning ourselves “dead to sin” and the other end hooked to reckoning ourselves “alive unto God” (Romans 6:11).

I love meditating on Hebrews 12:1 – 3 (ESV):

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

“Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?”

Christ is the Founder and Perfecter of our faith. We can be confident that He will complete the work that He began in us (Philippians 1:6). He is our faithful High Priest who has been “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

We are on a transformative battlefield with Jesus Christ, He is with us always, never leaving us or forsaking us (Matthew 28:20), and greater is He who is in us, than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

Christ is with us in the temptations we encounter – let us cultivate lives of “looking to Jesus” – never forgetting who He is, and who we are in Him.