Freedom from sin: a manly goal
Note: I am adapting this post from a couple of posts I wrote on a message board. The posts pertained to struggling against the temptation to use pornography.
Setting oneself to be free from sin is a manly goal. It takes enormous strength of character succeed at this goal. It is not a goal to be taken lightly or approached frivolously. It is deadly serious, and you must know that there will be a personal cost involved. You must also know that it will be a lifelong battle, because temptation will always harass you in one way or another.
The question is often asked, can you ever be free of temptation? No. Can you grow to gain greater freedom from sin? Yes.
There are times that we all feel that we are sinful because we are tempted. That is a sinister lie. If temptation made us guilty of sin ipso facto, then Jesus would be as much a sinner as anyone. The Scripture says that Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, and yet was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). Therefore, temptation does not make us sinful. Yielding to temptation is the sin, not the temptation itself.
You may understand this, at least at an intellectual level; it does bear repeating anyway, because we often when we feel the temptation, feel the pull of it, we get discouraged. We get discouraged because we really don’t want the sin in our lives, and the feeling of temptation urges us to give in, to indulge, to take pleasure from the sin.
And we do know that there is pleasure in sin, don’t we? There is a temporary pleasure from it; otherwise, why would it matter? Where there is no perception of benefit, temptation cannot exist. Where we perceive that something is not desirable, we aren’t going to be tempted by it. If Satan were to come and try to tempt you to eat a bowlful of chicken feces, would you feel the desire for it? I highly doubt it. There is nothing within a normal human being that would ever find chicken feces desirable to eat. Chocolate ice cream, on the other hand is often found desirable, and it can be a point of temptation.
So let’s face facts: you (and a whole lot of other people) find pornography to be pleasurable. It is pleasurable because it has the ability to be a sexual stimulant. And sexual stimulation is not evil, in and of itself, any more than eating is not evil, in and of itself. (God designed us to be sexual beings; and he gave us boundaries for the use of our sexuality in order to maximize its potential and eliminate the risk of wielding such enormous power.)
Thus we who wish to reject pornography from our lives have to train ourselves away from it. And we do so because we know full well that the pleasure of pornography is only temporary, and has such horrific effects on our lives that wisdom demands that we reject it. We don’t have to jump off that cliff to know that we’re going to die when we hit the rocks below. We can see the corpses of the dead littering the bottom; that should be warning enough.
So keep training your mind and heart with the truth. Don’t get discouraged if you stumble; pick yourself up and repent and keep up your training. You will eventually get to the point that your training will overrule the desire.
Why do we have to undergo temptation? Is this God’s fault? Can’t he just prevent it?
In James 1:13-15, the Bible says, “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. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Remember, too, that God intends for our struggles to be a means of strengthening ourselves. Hebrews 5: 7-8 teaches us that Jesus underwent temptation in order to learn how it feels to be obedient in the face of severe opposition. He went through it the same way we would have to go through it, by relying on the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we look at the paradox contained in the statements “God cannot be tempted” -> “Christ is God” -> “Christ was tempted” and fail to reckon with some important truths, we are going to get very confused, and we will not be able to grasp the truth within the paradox. I think (with good support) that James was not talking about the earthly life of Christ, and how he dealt with temptation, but rather, James was expressing some practical wisdom on how we believers need to reckon with temptation. James’s admonition is that we shouldn’t shift blame onto God for our struggles, and we should remember the vulnerability we still have to the flesh.
Christ was tempted; that we are assured of in the Word. That is to say, Satan tried every trick he uses with us against Christ. And Christ, being free from the sin nature that clings to us believers, did not have the lever of the flesh that we contend with. So to that extent, one may say that our experience of temptation differs from that of Christ. However, let us not forget that , according to Scripture, our flesh has been put to death. “I am crucified with Christ,” wrote Paul. At the same time, we must continually wrestle against the flesh, as Satan still has the capacity to pull its strings. Even so, the death of the flesh means that we cannot be compelled to obey it. We are free to choose. If you have received Christ as your Savior, you have, by virtue of your new birth in Christ, been put in the same place as Christ, and have the ability to act as Christ acted in time of temptation.
Let’s go back to the concept of the sin nature. How does it create vulnerabilities to temptation in our lives? To understand this, think for a moment of the analogy we often use of “mental tapes”. We have ingrained thought and behavior habits that we describe as “tapes playing again and again” that interfere with our lives, and are points of vulnerability to temptation. That’s what James is warning about. We are used to doing what the tapes tell us. We are used to following the impulses we’ve always followed. Satan will “push the Play button” to get those thought patterns rolling in our minds, and pull us in. God, in his wisdom, does not erase those tapes, but rather encourages us to discipline ourselves against those messages. We are free to choose, so we must choose over and over and over again. As we do so, the message of the tapes becomes weaker and weaker until we can ignore it very easily; it becomes background noise for us. Our vulnerability will never completely disappear while we are in this world, but we can be so strong and so resistant to it that we can deflect temptation quite easily, as long as we maintain good discipline.
To conclude, the use pornography is but one of many things to which we may be tempted. There are many others; we can all think of something that is easy for us to give in to. But the path of self-control is a path to victory over whatever temptations we contend with. It is a worthy path. It is a manly goal.
