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Wouldn’t it be nice if everything we shouldn’t do just clearly didn’t look right? But we’re always drawn to the new and the shiny, just as the serpent in Genesis 3 makes the one tree God forbade look like the most beautiful in the garden—a delight to the eyes—and Eve takes of its fruit and eats.
Waiting is hard—praying for years with silence the only reply, watching others move while you stand still, wondering if God has forgotten or if you took a wrong turn. That was Isaac in Genesis 25: married at forty, still childless nearly twenty years later, the promise hanging unfinished. What do we do in the long stretch when nothing seems to move?
Sin makes us sick over and over, yet we keep charging right back to the buffet—unlike food poisoning, which at least teaches us to stay away from the contaminated food. That’s the human struggle Jesus faces head-on when He teaches us to pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” in Matthew 6:13.
Even after turning our lives over to Christ, we can still pray as though God were there to serve our wants and protect our plans. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Ask, seek, and knock,” raising a searching question for daily prayer: When we belong to Him, what should we be asking our Father to give?
When fear and uncertainty close in, we don’t just want comfort—we want control, something solid we can hold onto. In Exodus 32, Israel melts down the very gold God gave them in Egypt to cast a god they can see, and the impulse driving that golden calf is closer to our own hearts than we’d like to admit.
Talking donkeys? Paid prophets? What’s going on here? Balaam and his donkey (Numbers 22) help us to think about facing temptations and living faithfully as we start a new series tonight. In the series, we’ll look at this man who teetered between listening to the Lord and listening to the world around him and see the ways we struggle with the same.
Temptations appear in seasons. How does Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness help us better understand how we prepare for those seasons?
Satan tempted Jesus, yet He did not fall to those temptations. Tonight we consider our temptation to seek shortcuts in faithfulness.
Pastor Tim continues our series “the Temptations,” looking at how we are all tempted to misuse God’s faithfulness and what God calls us to do to avoid that.
Satan tempted Jesus, yet He did not fall to those temptations. Over the next three weeks, we’ll see how His overcoming was for us.
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