Resisting Temptation: Strength in God and Community

In this sermon, I discussed the importance of recognizing and resisting temptation, and the role of God in helping us do so. I emphasized that temptation is a part of life that we all face, and it often leads us to trade what we need in the long term for what we want in the short term. However, I stressed that we are not alone in this struggle. God is there to help us, and we must depend on Him to overcome temptation. I also highlighted the importance of knowing, living, and inviting the truth. This involves studying God's word, living according to His teachings, and inviting others to hold us accountable. Finally, I touched on the importance of community in our spiritual journey, and the need to reach out to others who may be in need of God's love and guidance.

Key Takeaways:
- Temptation is a part of life, but we can resist it with God's help [ 49:59]
- Knowing, living, and inviting the truth are key to overcoming temptation [ 52:42]
- Community and accountability are important in our spiritual journey [ 56:02]
- We should reach out to others who may be in need of God's love and guidance [ 57:16]

Bible Reading:
1. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." #!!45:00!!#
2. "God will never give you a temptation beyond what you can bear." #!!46:25!!#
3. "God has never allowed a temptation into our lives that we and He can't conquer consistently together." #!!48:01!!#

Observation Questions:
1. What does the phrase "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" mean to you?
2. How does the statement "God will never give you a temptation beyond what you can bear" resonate with your personal experiences?
3. What does it mean that "God has never allowed a temptation into our lives that we and He can't conquer consistently together"?

Interpretation Questions:
1. How does the concept of God leading us away from temptation and delivering us from evil relate to our daily lives?
2. How does the idea that God will never give us a temptation beyond what we can bear with Him challenge or affirm your understanding of God's character?
3. What implications does the idea that God and we can conquer any temptation together have for our personal and communal faith journeys?

Application Questions:
1. Can you identify a recent situation where you felt tempted? How could you have leaned on God's strength in that situation?
2. What is one temptation you consistently struggle with? How can you invite God into this struggle moving forward?
3. How can you foster a deeper dependence on God in your daily life to better resist temptation?
4. Can you think of a person in your life who might be struggling with temptation? How can you support them in a Christ-like manner?
5. How can you use your experiences with temptation and God's deliverance to encourage others in their faith journey?

Day 1: Knowing, Living, and Inviting the Truth

In our journey of faith, it's crucial to not only know the truth but to live it and invite it into our lives. This involves studying God's word, applying it to our daily lives, and inviting God and others to be honest with us about our spiritual growth. This process helps us identify the exits from temptation and depend on God for strength and guidance. [49:59]

Bible Passage: James 1:22 - "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

Reflection: What steps can you take today to not only know the truth but live it and invite it into your life?

Day 2: The Gap Between Belief and Behavior

Often, there's a gap between what we believe and how we behave. This gap can lead us away from God's best for us. It's important to not only believe in God's word but to act on it, closing the gap between our faith and our actions. [52:42]

Bible Passage: James 2:17 - "In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."

Reflection: What is one area in your life where you see a gap between your belief and your behavior? How can you address this gap?

Day 3: The Power of Prayer

Prayer is a powerful tool that helps us see the gaps in our lives and motivates us to do something about them. It's not enough to believe or think differently; we must act on our faith and develop healthy habits of prayer. [41:48]

Bible Passage: 1 Thessalonians 5:17 - "Pray without ceasing."

Reflection: How can you incorporate prayer into your daily routine to help you identify and address the gaps in your life?

Day 4: Escaping Temptation Through God's Deliverance

We all face temptations that can lead us away from God's best for us. However, we can escape these temptations through God's deliverance. We must remember that we can't battle temptations alone; we need God's help to conquer them. [43:38]

Bible Passage: 1 Corinthians 10:13 - "No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it."

Reflection: What temptations are you currently facing and how can you rely on God's deliverance to overcome them?

Day 5: Found People, Find People

As followers of Jesus, we are called to find people who need to know Him. This is a reflex that should become instinctive for us. We are called to invite others into a relationship with God and share the good news of His love and salvation. [56:02]

Bible Passage: Matthew 28:19 - "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

Reflection: Who in your life needs to hear about Jesus? How can you invite them into a relationship with Him this week?

God, for some of us, that's the longest we've ever talked to you about it. It's the longest we've ever let you show us a face or tell us a name or remind us of a situation. And God, we don't just pray that we would see it. We pray that we do something about it. That you'd move us even today to take a step. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

So when we've let our reflexes atrophy over time, it's going to take training. It's going to take effort, like we just did, even just in these little small healthy habits of prayer, to grow those muscles of reflex again. But it can be done. This prayer is a tool in your life to regularly ask God to show you the gaps. But my encouragement is don't just let believing something correctly or thinking something differently be enough. Jesus says that even the demons believe and tremble. The distinction for us as followers of Jesus is that we do something about it. That we have supernatural reflexes because of it.

Maybe your next step is to text the person right now that God just brought to your mind. Maybe it's to ask, "Hey, can we grab coffee this week?" Maybe it's to pray for them this week. Can I tell you a secret? It's really hard to be mad at somebody you're praying for. Notice I said someone you're praying for, not someone you're praying about. Those are different ideas. This is really important because righteous reflexes come from healthy habits of prayer. You can't do this on your own.

But the other side of that truth is that our reflexes to life and faith are often destructive. When we are trying to live out our faith without prayer, without this regular, actual, not transactional relationship with God, you can't do this on your own. You're not meant to.

Which leads us to our final section of the Lord's Prayer and the second reflex that we'll look at together today, which is we escape because God delivers. There are plenty of times when we convince ourselves that we have outsmarted someone or maybe we've been crafty enough to avoid the consequences of our decisions. But that's not the whole truth, is it?

The easiest way to see in our lives and understand this concept is in reverse. If you consider your current capacity, your current decisions, your current freedoms, your current finances, your current influence, and you were to think, what would it look like if me 20 years ago was given all of that? And for some of you that math doesn't work, so think 10 years ago, right? What would it have looked like? And the quick diagnosis is that we would not have been ready to handle it, whatever that gap is.

One of the ways that I think God helps you and me and protects you and me from our own decisions is by growing our capacity as our character grows. As a matter of fact, where usually crises in our life emerge is when our capacity grows faster than our character, when it looks like we can handle more than we actually can.

Jesus finishes this pattern of prayer by focusing on our capacity to endure temptation. He says it this way: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." After everything that he has led us to put into our prayers—reverence to God's power, acknowledging God's kingdom, seeking God's kingdom in our crisis, depending on God for assumed provision, forgiving others as a result of God's forgiveness of us—he finishes with temptation, which feels especially important, doesn't it?

Even if you are not someone who follows Jesus, you know what temptation is, don't you? Temptation always calls us to decisions that we know will trade what we need ultimately for what we want immediately. That's what temptation does. The Bible describes that pattern of decisions and the destruction that follows it as sin, missing the mark from God's best for us, rebellion against the pattern and plan your creator designed for you, and we all have succumbed to it.

Temptation is never neutral. We are made in the image of God with infinite dignity, value, and worth, but we are also fallen. And in our fallenness, we are highly capable of self-justification and self-deception. Nobody can convince you that you have a good reason for the patterns in your life better than you can, right? The Bible describes itself as a mirror that helps us see our truest self, all the good and all the bad.

So if you look into the mirror of God's best for your faith, your family, your future, what are the compromises you are tempted to trade in for that future today? Those are your temptations: unhealthy relationships, unsustainable spending habits, unachievable expectations. We are chasing all of them if we're not careful, and they can all fuel compromise, but they don't have to.

Now, for us, there's this Christian teaching that maybe you've heard before that gets communicated: God will never give you a temptation beyond what you can bear. How many of you have heard that? Have you ever heard that idea? God will never give you a temptation beyond what you can bear. Can I tell you a secret? That's not true. You know it's not true. Like, if that's true, I should have probably succumbed to a lot less temptations. That's not what this prayer teaches us.

Now, it is true that God has never allowed a temptation into our lives that we and He can't conquer consistently together. Remember, we're supposed to be dependent on Him. Jesus is not my crutch. He's my oxygen. I'm not trying to figure out how to wean myself off of Him so I can stand on my own two feet. I'm trying to figure out how to be more connected, more dependent, more reliant on Him.

And if you are trying to battle temptations in your life alone, you will fail alone. That's the pattern. So, if we're going to escape as a reflex of God delivering us, what does that deliverance look like?

Well, several years ago, when we were flying on planes, all of us were given permission, thank God, to continue to listen to or watch whatever we were listening to or watching the entire time. Which made me feel terrible for the flight attendants as they were explaining all of the emergency procedures we might need to know because none of us are paying any attention, right? It's really sad. Except I will say our four-year-old pays tons of attention. He's got the pamphlet open, he's looking, so we're probably set. He's going to definitely know what to do, right?

But we all assume we either won't need that information or that we will remember it if we do. And I think we view all of this very similarly. The path to escape on an airplane is very important. But you probably have never needed to know it, and I hope you never do. And so you could fly your entire life being given that instruction every single time you get on a plane for the plane that you're on and never need it one time.

And I think we think that about temptation. We think that about the way we live. But you have already faced temptation that you needed to know the exits from today. And you will face it again today. And it's waiting for you tomorrow. And so if we don't pattern in our lives this increasing dependence of knowing where the exits are and depending on God for that reality, we will continue to fail.

See, there are three things that I think God really, really, really wants you and me to lean into in order to discover where the exits are as you face temptation. The first one is to know the truth. The second one is to live the truth, and the third one is to invite the truth.

We know the truth by studying God's word and by making sure we aren't just assuming that our memory of a few stories from childhood is enough. Or maybe a few lines that you heard in a sermon are enough. That's not enough. God wants you and me to get steeped into who He is. And that's what He reveals in His word. Maybe it's a new reading plan. Maybe it's a devotional guide that you read if you've never done this before.

If you're looking for one that I'd recommend, I'd really encourage you to check out a book called *New Morning Mercies* by Paul Tripp. It's a way for you to know the truth each morning as you begin your day to begin to depend on who God is in a more practical, immediate way. But we actually have to live it. Remember, we can't just know it. It's not enough to believe it. We have to do it.

So I just wonder, where are the gaps between what you believe and how you behave, just like we talked about last week? And finally, we invite the truth by asking God and others to be honest with us about what they're seeing. Oftentimes, this will look like kind of early warning signs for the decisions or direction of our life.

And some of us, what we don't realize has happened is we are intentionally or unintentionally avoiding meaningful relationships in our lives because we don't want this. And so you've got lots of reasons about why you're not in a life group, but the real reason is you don't want anybody in your life to tell you what's going on that might be moving you a little further from God's best for you. You don't want anybody—none of their business. Well, it is their business because God has given us to one another that we might support one another, hold one another accountable, encourage one another.

So for you, maybe the step is to join a group. Maybe for you, the step is to get involved in intentional community because you cannot do this alone. Every time you think, "God will never give me a temptation beyond what I can bear," I'm just telling you that's a lie. He can give it to you so that you will depend on Him and others to get you through it. That's how you get through it.

There are plenty of places where we are told to fight something in our spiritual lives, you know that. But with temptation, you know what we're told to do? Flee, run. Even the prayer is asking that God would show up and show us the path to run.

So that's what we'll do. I'm going to pray this last line of this passage, and I'm going to give you a moment that God would show you your escape plan. Not for you to know it, not for you to believe it, but for you to do it. So just pray these words with me: "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Take a moment, pray.

God, for some of us, there are areas of our life where we have just simply assumed that we're never going to get past that. We're never going to find victory there. We're never going to experience that. And God, I pray that right now, even in these moments that we've given to you, you will show us that that's a lie. There is hope. We can find strength in you. We don't just need the exit, God. We need you to walk through it with us. We need you to bring people along that can do that with us. Would you do that today? It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

You did it. You have prayed through the entire Lord's Prayer pattern. He gave it to us 2,000 years ago, and you're still learning it, you're still incorporating it, you're still working on it. And I know that the answers to these prayers, even just in a few moments, they may bring more complexity to your life. They may bring a conversation with someone this week.

And I would say maybe for some of you, that means you're going to go see your prayer team at your campus after service today and just ask for some help. We're just getting started, but well done. You have done more than most people will ever do as it relates to growing their prayer life, but you're not done.

Now, one more reflex that I want to remind you of as we finish our time together is this reflex: Found people, find people. Found people, find people. For several years, I lived in upstate New York, and I was young, and there was this girl named Rachel who was not a Christian. I kept having faith conversations with her about life and Jesus. I was young, and they were messy, and they were imperfect, but I tried to be kind and patient towards her, and she did the same for me.

It was great. The conversation lasted a few months, and then my family moved back to Ohio, and I didn't really think much about it until a year later, rather, I was visiting my church in New York more than a year later. As I sat in the back row of a service, I saw a bright red head of hair in the front row. At the end of the service, they turned around, and it was Rachel. She saw me, and she screamed and ran up and gave me a big hug. Her friends, who I did not know, asked her who I was, and I'll never forget what she said. She said, "This is my friend Phil. He's the only one that would talk to me about God when I was crazy."

Now, I'm not sharing that with you so you know how incredible I am. There are hundreds of stories that ended the opposite way of that one in my life. But I share that with you because I think that ultimately, if we know Jesus, one of those reflexes is that if you really are found in Him, you can't help but find people who need to know Him.

If you're a follower of Jesus, you have been found forever, and becoming finders of people who are close to us and far from Him should become instinctive for us. It should become second nature. And next week at all of our campuses is a tremendous opportunity to use that reflex that found people find people to invite some of them to come with you.

To come with you to a later service time, to come with you and experience church with you, and begin a series with us called *Explore God*, where we're going to dive into some of the biggest questions of our journey with God. We're going to talk about how we can discuss and discover what it means to know God. For some of you, it will be a great refresher course. But for some of your friends, for some of your family, for some of your neighbors, this is going to be the thing that God uses to move them from death to life, from an eternity separated from Him to an eternity with Him forever.

So I just hope that these reflexes that God wants to develop in you and me, that we would give God space to do it. Before we go, I want to just pray that He might do that for us this week. Would you pray with me?

God, there are so many of us that bring challenges and weight into a room like this, and we came to get that stuff dealt with. God, I'm so thankful that we're here and that you care and that that can happen. But God, there are also things in our lives that I think you're calling us to set aside for a minute. There are priorities in our lives that maybe we have made too big that we can't see the people around us who are close to us and far from you.

And so I pray that there would be people in our lives—there would be family members that you're bringing to our mind right now, friends, neighbors, co-workers, classmates—that God, you would give us the courage, give us the words this week to say, "You should come with me to my church this weekend. Do you want to know what I believe?"

God, I would love for part of our story as a community to be seeing you move in our region in the weeks to come, to see people who want nothing to do with you, not in any way possible, finding you and faithfully following you because of it. God, use us for something bigger than us. We love you. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.

1. "This prayer is a tool in your life to regularly ask God to show you the gaps. But my encouragement is don't just let believing something correctly or thinking something differently be enough. The distinction for us as followers of Jesus is that we do something about it." - 42:38

2. "Temptation always calls us to decisions that we know will trade what we need ultimately for what we want immediately. That's what temptation does. The Bible describes that pattern of decisions and the destruction that follows it as sin, missing the mark from God's best for us." - 45:00

3. "If you are trying to battle temptations in your life alone, you will fail alone. That's the pattern. So, if we're going to escape as a reflex of God delivering us, what does that deliverance look like?" - 46:25

4. "If you're a follower of Jesus you have been found forever and becoming finders of people who are close to us and far from him it should become instinctive for us. It should become second nature." - 56:02

5. "But God there are also things in our lives that I think you're calling us to set aside for a minute. There are priorities in our lives that maybe we have made too big that we can't see the people around us who are close to us and far from you." - 57:16