If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall. The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure. [1 Corinthians 10:13 (NLT)]
Inspired by Lynn Johnston’s comic strip For Better or for Worse, I’ve been writing about temptation. Yesterday, we left John sadly driving away from the car dealership after test driving his dream sport car. Seeing John’s “lip prints on the hood,” the salesman knew his customer would return and he was right. In the next day’s comic, John has an appointment with the bank and is justifying his decision to buy the car. “If I trade in my sedan,” he rationalizes, “I won’t need a big loan.” Like Satan, the salesman helps John further justify his purchase by assuring him it’s no big deal. In fact, he asserts it’s really no different from when John’s wife goes out and buys herself something at the mall.
In another strip, we find John purchasing a tweed cap, red cashmere scarf and driving gloves, announcing that, “I’m not just buying a car…I’m buying a life style!” When we sin, before we know it, Satan has sold us a new lifestyle. Sooner or later, we discover that new way of life is nowhere near as nice as we thought it would be. In fact, in another comic, we see John starting to have buyer’s remorse when his wife points out that, without his sedan, he’ll have to drive his sporty new convertible all winter long. As Adam and Eve and the Israelites quickly discovered, sinner’s remorse can be much worse than a cold car with no traction in a Canadian snow storm. The first family’s fleeting pleasure from that bite of sweet apple certainly wasn’t worth eviction from Paradise nor were the years of slavery in Babylon what the Israelites envisioned when they worshipped idols.
The story is told of a teacher who asks her Sunday school class what must be done for forgiveness. Little Billy immediately yells out, “First, we gotta sin!” Indeed, the temptation to sin is where our troubles begin and that temptation, like a sports car or flirtation, usually starts out looking like a whole lot of fun. The lesson learned from Lynn Johnston’s series isn’t to stay away from used car lots; it’s to be alert and stay away from Satan’s salesmen! They’re even more aggressive than the top salesperson at the local dealership.
They were sailing in the Sea of Galilee, a body of water notorious for sudden violent storms. At least four of the disciples were fishermen; did none of them question Jesus about the possibility of squalls or rough waters? Jesus, being God and omniscient, surely knew a storm was brewing and yet He told the men to take the boat across the sea. As the squall came rolling in, the disciples fought the waves. While they frantically reefed the sails and bailed water, Jesus calmly slept on a cushion in the boat’s stern. To the terrified disciples it seemed as if He didn’t care that they were going to drown.
Living in a nation where we worship freely and can both possess and read the Bible, we can easily get complacent and forget that Satan is trying to defeat the spread of the gospel message. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, those Gideon Bibles we find in our hotel rooms are becoming an endangered species. In this era of political correctness and inclusiveness, hotels want to avoid offending people of other faiths or no faith at all. Two years ago, for example, citing “diversity” reasons, the Travelodge chain in the United Kingdom removed Bibles from all of its rooms. Last year, the Freedom from Religion Foundation asked fifteen major hotel companies to keep Bibles out of hotel rooms. With threats of lawsuits, they succeeded in convincing hotels operated by some state universities in Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa to do just that. The FFRF has also printed a sticker reading, “Warning: Literal belief in this book may endanger your health and life.” They encourage their supporters to place the stickers on any hotel room Bible they find.
As I looked through my basket of Christmas cards, I thought of all the people who have passed through my life. Contained in that basket is a fair amount of sorrow and misfortune—divorce, heart failure, assorted diseases, surgeries (some successful and others not), heartbreak, disappointment, cancer, mental illness, addiction, paralysis, birth defects, financial difficulty, and loss. Yet, within that basket, I also find hope, faith, resilience, peace, joy, perseverance, strength and love. There are children who defied the odds, families facing tremendous challenges with great courage, people who’ve forgiven the unforgiveable, widows and widowers meeting their new normal with confidence, hurt people determined to heal, caregivers finding strength to continue when many would quit, parents prayerfully waiting for prodigals to return, and people who can still laugh in the face of adversity.
Devotions of the Heart 