Temptation

I'm cheating tonight. I'm going a little backward in the story & I'm not writing myself. This is a passage from a chapter on the first temptation of Christ in the book Tempted and Tried.

"Sometimes we actually empower Satan by the way we speak of Christian conversion. We highlight the testimony of the ex-alcoholic who says, "Since I met Jesus I've never wanted another drink." Now that happens sometimes, and we should give thanks for God's power here. But this liberation is no more miraculous, indeed in some ways less so, than the testimony of the repentant drunk who says, "Every time I hear a clink of ice in a glass I tremble with desire, but God is faithful in keeping me sober.

The girl with same-sex desires might conclude she is doomed to be a lesbian because she isn't drawn to boys and still fights her attraction to girls. Family members who have to cut up their credit cards to keep from spending every paycheck on what they see advertised may conclude they're just not 'spiritual' enough to follow Christ because they will war again their wants. Nonsense. You are not what you want. You are who you are. And that's defined by the Word of God. It might be that God frees your appetite from whatever it's drawn toward, but usually he instead enables you to fight it. This might on go on for forty day, for forty years. That's all right. There must be room then in our churches for a genuine bearing of one another's burdens when it comes to appetites. Pretending the appetites are instantly nullified by conversion is a rejection of what God has told us--that we are still in a war zone." p.72,73

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There are more good quotes to share:

"The ultimate antidote to self-provision, and the ultimate fuel for self-control, is gratitude. Gratitude isn't about God's ego. It is about our discipline, our being shaped into the kind of men and women who can be kings and queens over the universe. We can only inherit that kingdom as little children, (Matthew 18:4), that is, as those who have a receptivity to blessing. We embrace God's discipline, feasting when he feeds our appetites, waiting when he doesn't, because we know he is working to us good in the end

It's true that gratitude and contentment and self-control don't stop your stomach from grumbling. You want what you want. But the discipline of God teaches you, slowly, to put old appetites to death and to whet new ones. Through the Spirit of Christ you learn to crucify 'the flesh with its passions and desires' (Galatians 5:24). That's hard. It usually means hunger or economic want or sexual frustration or familial longing. but through it we learn to see that life is about more than acquisitions--whether acquisitions of possessions or orgasms or pleasant memories. The temporary hunger can cause us, with our Lord Jesus in the wilderness temptations, to turn away from momentary satisfaction--whether of our culinary or sexual or consumer 'needs'--and toward the more permanent things." p. 94,95