One of the scariest places for a believer to be is the place where he begins to feel that he’s above temptation. And I think all of us experience that overconfidence once in a while.
As a pastor friend of mine once said, “We’re all just one action away from losing it all.” That may or may not be literal, depending on what the action is, or how much “it all” refers to; even so, there’s a lot conveyed in that simple statement.
Spiritual warfare is a concept a lot of Christians don’t like to acknowledge. I can understand that to a degree, because it reminds us of the old cartoons where the “angel” version of the character’s self perches on one shoulder suggesting the right thing to do while a “devil” version of himself advises the wrong thing to do.
Temptation is very real.
Before beginning his public ministry, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness where he encountered Satan. Satan tried numerous times to tempt Him: he tried to use Jesus’s hunger against Him, then tried to tempt him with power and a kingdom of His own. Jesus resisted temptation, always quoting scripture as He did so. But the passage (from Luke 4) ends with an interesting line:
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit,  returned from the Jordan and was led around  by the Spirit in the wilderness  for  forty days, being tempted by the devil. And He ate nothing during those days, and when they had ended, He became hungry. And the devil said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”  And Jesus answered him,  “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.'”
And he led Him up and showed Him all the kingdoms of  the world in a moment of time.  And the devil said to Him, “I will give You all this domain and  its glory;  for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore if You  worship before me, it shall all be Yours.”  Jesus answered him,  “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.'”
And he led Him to Jerusalem and had Him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here;  for it is written,
‘He will command His angels concerning You to guard You,’
‘On  their  hands they will bear You up,
So that You will not strike Your foot against a stone.'”And Jesus answered and said to him,  “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'”
When the devil had finished every temptation, he left Him until an opportune time.
Think about that for a second: Jesus Himself defeated Satan by not giving in to temptation, but Satan didn’t decide to give up. Like a stalker, he merely backed away on a temporary basis, holding back for a time when he might have an advantage after all. With Jesus, it’s probably a safe bet that there’d be no opportune time ever. But Satan wouldn’t necessarily know that, and he certainly wouldn’t make that assumption and just give up.
But then there’s the rest of us: we all have those “opportune times,” and we’re much more likely to fall victim to them when our defenses are down.
What makes us vulnerable? We need hardly count the ways! Anger, lust, greed, hate, sadness, fear…the list goes on and on. And any one of them could make us take a moral stumble with even the slightest amount of prodding.
What do you do to defend yourself against those “opportune times”?
In Al-Anon, we learn the acromyn HALT. It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonley and Tired. Those tend to be our “opportune times”.
TedtheThird Very interesting. Thanks, Ted…hadn’t heard of “HALT” but there’s a great deal of truth behind that.