Temptation?

Temptation.

Devil said to Adam “You will be like God.” (Genesis 3:4) That backfired huh?

Jesus, when returning from his time of prayer in the garden, challenged his disciples by questioning them on why, instead of praying, they were sleeping. He encouraged them to pray and to do so that “they may not fall into temptation.” (Luke 22:46) This has always struck me as being an odd thing for Jesus to say, and in particular, what temptation was he talking about?

Jesus, during his prayer in Gethsemane, clearly voiced his desire to the Father to ‘have this cup” taken from him. Is it possible that the temptation that Jesus is referring to was the temptation to act out of what one feels vs. living out of what one knows to be true? When I am experiencing temptation, most often it takes on the form of feelings that I am experiencing. Feelings that scream with such intensity that my very life and will seems bound to them. Temptation is speaking to my soul through the conduit of my emotions saying things like, “If this desire or feeling goes un-satisfied, or un-gratified, I may not make it.

Have you ever been so sad about something that the feelings about that situation begin to bleed into everything in your life? It’s the red sock in the white laundry; everything is now tinted a shade of red. When how you feel is the only lens, or the primary lens by which you look at your life and determine what is true, things have a tendency to get pretty messy, quickly.

This temptation to trusting our feelings is fundamentally a temptation to trust ourselves over what the Father has called us to, namely to trust him with our very lives. The obedience we see displayed in Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross is the very obedience we see lacking in Adam in Genesis 3. Theologians have referred to Christ as the “second” Adam for centuries. What was proved to be impossible for Adam, to trust the Father over himself and his feelings, was accomplished in and through Christ (Romans 5).

This should give us great hope and comfort. If we are to become people who live beyond the scope of our feelings, we need help. Actually we need more than help, we need for Him to do something for us and in us that we cannot do for ourselves. It should comfort us because Adam, Eve, and everyone since are living proof that something outside of us is needed to live in obedience to the Father. It also changes what we do with our feelings. We don’t spend needless amounts of time in shame over feelings we didn’t conjure and can’t overcome. It drives us to the very place and person who can set us free. The problem is that we actually believe that we are free in the first place. We think that we are free, but in reality scripture teaches us that we are slaves. Slaves to sin, slaves to our feelings, slaves to ourselves (Romans 6:17). We need to be set free.
That’s the whole reason Jesus came, to make free men and women out of slaves.

Galatians 5:1 - It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.