LOVE, GROW, SERVE

I’m working on the next youth group series about temptation (coming to a youth group near you, AKA Common Ground, starting October 25). Temptation is a funny thing, isn’t it? In Christian circles, we blame temptation for a variety of things: problems in our lives, bad decisions we’ve made, sins committed. There are so many things we’re tempted by, and yet I think sometimes we bury our heads in the sand and try to pretend it’s not there. Until it is.

As I’m studying what God says about temptation, I came across this passage in James 1:
“When people are tempted, they should not say, ‘God is tempting me.’ …But people are tempted when their own evil desire leads them away and traps them. This desire leads to sin, and then the sin grows and brings death.”

Wow. Ouch. What this tells me is that, despite what you may have heard (even in church! heaven forbid!), God doesn’t tempt us with evil desires just to test us or see how faithful we are. God is, by definition, good. Instead, temptation is so scary because it’s a glimpse into the darkness of the human sinful nature. It’s a snapshot of what I like to call the “yuck” — the ugly stuff that resides in our hearts, the stuff we’d rather not talk about, think about, or let anyone else see.

I am no neat freak, but I like to keep the house pretty clean and picked up. Especially the living room–the very first part of the house that any visitor sees (and sometimes, the only part of the house a visitor sees). The living room, despite being the room that our family “lives” in the most, is almost always the cleanest room of the house. I want it to look good, be comfortable, and I want to feel peaceful by sitting in a peaceful room.

In contrast, our bedroom is almost always the messiest room in the house. It’s the one place where I don’t usually worry about putting things away, cleaning things up, and obsessively vacuuming the floor. Know why? Because no one ever sees our bedroom except us. Whenever we go to work and our babysitter comes over, the door is shut. Whenever we have guests over, the door is shut. I can successfully shut out the ugly truth about our messy room.  (Well, only for so long, until we can’t find our bed under the piles of clothes, but that’s another story.)

Sometimes I think we try to do that with the yuck that’s in our hearts. But despite our best efforts, sometimes the yuck surfaces. Then what do we do?

James says we run back to God. Just recently, we were at Target and Ethan (our 3 year-old) ventured up to one of those full-size skeleton things you can put on your front porch at Halloween to scare little kids. Not expecting it to do anything, he walked right up to it. Suddenly, it began to move and talk in a scary voice. You should have seen his eyes as he ran back to us as fast as he could go! It was actually pretty hilarious. Only with us, his Mom & Dad, did he feel safe.

And we can only be truly safe from temptation as long as we stay close to God and depend on Him daily, and allow Him to shine a light on the yuck inside us so He can deal with it in His love!!

These are just some of the things I am thinking about.  Come to youth group over the next 4 weeks or so and we’ll explore this monster called temptation together!!