Several years ago Jessica, a new Christian, found her father hanging from a rope in her room, dead by his own hand. She was haunted by this horror, of course, and even more so because it was obvious he had planned to be found in a place where she’d be the one to find him. In the suicide note, he criticized and taunted Jessica, calling her a disappointment and a failure.
For years, she didn’t want to fall in love, didn’t want to marry, because she knew her destiny. Her father wasn’t alone in killing himself. His father had done the same, as had his father before him. There was something dark in the gene pool back there, she thought, and she saw the same depressive tendencies in herself that her father had at that age. She could see her future before her, and in it she was hanging from a rope. She just didn’t want there to be any children there to suffer for another generation as she had through hers.
Now you might not have something as horrific as all of that behind you and in front of you. But there’s something there. And many of us often feel as helpless as Jessica when surveying our past patterns and our future prospects. Jessica is wrong in the way she’s seeing this—and so are you. You are not your history, and you are not your destiny. If you are in Christ, you are a new creation. Your past is his past, and your future is his future. You do not have to be what you are.
In one sense, Jessica is actually gifted with a perception many of us can’t see (or ignore). She has looked at the possible outcome of her life, if she follows a particular path. If she embraces this as a Christian, this could actually prove to be a way to empower her resistance to temptation.
The apostle Paul warned the church at Corinth about the consequences of sin by pointing them to a picture of an alternative reality, to what would happen if they fell to Satan’s strategies. The Israelite ancestors, Paul wrote, were “destroyed by serpents” and “destroyed by the Destroyer” (1 Cor. 10:9-10). Twenty-three thousand of them fell “in a single day” (1 Cor. 10:8). They were “overthrown in the wilderness” (1 Cor. 10:5). This, Paul wrote, is an “example” for us (1 Cor. 10:11). Again, these were clearly believers in the church at Corinth. But the apostle nonetheless thought they ought to know about the disaster that could await them, a theme consistent throughout the Bible. God uses warnings to keep us from falling.
As you face whatever temptation you’re up against, consider the warning of temporal disaster. The simple truth is that, when you’re in the throes of giving in to a temptation, you just don’t know what you really want. The bread that was previously stone might have tasted good, but Jesus knew it wasn’t worth being excluded from the table of God. God has designed the universe in such a way that we flourish when we walk with the grain of the cosmos and not against it. Taking a dog by the ears might seem to be an exciting thing to do, in the moment, but observation of human nature and of dog nature and of the way the world works ought to keep you from doing it (Prov. 26:17).
In the Proverbs, a father showed his son the inevitable results of adultery. These aren’t just the eschatological results (that we can know by faith), but also those that can be observed, over the period of a life, by sight. The bitter end of this momentary ecstasy is disgrace and ruin (Prov. 5:8-14). In his providential discipline of us, God tends to put such pictures before us, that we might watch and take warning. A while back, I heard of a pastor I’d long respected who was caught in a secret pattern of sin. What seared into my conscience wasn’t his sin (which wasn’t all that unusual) or even the loss of his ministry, his reputation, and his home. What I remember most is hearing him talk about what it is like to drive several hours away to his daughter’s college dormitory room to tell her what her Dad had done. I don’t even have a daughter, and my children are far from college-aged, but I could envision that scenario, with horror. The human carnage of that struck me, and haunts me even now. Often in moments like this, what you hear is the Spirit saying, “This easily could be you. Hear and be warned.”
This is one of the reason we need an intimacy between generations in our families and in our churches. These days most people spend a large portion of their lives staring at screens and “consuming media.” Previous generations would have ended their evenings gathered around listening to one another tell stories or sing ballads or recite sagas. There is something lost there. When all I have is my peer group and the “entertainment” marketed to my peer group, I lose the kind of perspective that sees the ultimate comeuppance of pride or the heartbreak of sexual licentiousness or the sadness of dying with nothing more than a bunch of stuff piled around you.
Moreover, we’re all going to face the unique temptations that come with each stage of life. We teach our children ahead of time that puberty will mean “a lot of strange things will be happening.” Why don’t we do the same thing in having older men preparing thirty-somethings for the testosterone drop that often prompts a so-called “midlife crisis”? Why can’t older women teach younger women how to handle the hormonal upheaval that can come with menopause, and how to go through it with Christlikeness? Why couldn’t the elderly in our congregations warn the younger generations about the pull toward bitterness or despondency or rage that can come with failing health or life in nursing homes?
As you resist temptation, keep a close watch on the stories around you, not with a prurient interest and certainly not with a sense of moral superiority, but with a sense of warned empathy. You could be in every one of those situations. Feel the horror that comes with each of them.
Taken from Tempted and Tried by Russell Moore copyright ©2011. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
