We're skipping ahead just a little bit because we're going to come back and go through the chapter in terms of all of the principles related to temptation next time, but I want to look at the way in which temptation works, verses 12 and following. Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone, but each one is drawn Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. Amen. Father God, I pray that you would enable me to faithfully bring your word, bring to my mind any things that I have not thought of that need to be said. I just pray that you would also quicken the word to our hearts and enable us to be the stronger for it. And help us to worship you and just to adore you as we look at the plan that you set forth in your word. And I pray it in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. May be seated. Let me begin this morning by giving three scenarios that could happen in any church. And I'm not picking, these are not people in our congregation, so don't feel like I'm singling you out. These are names that I've just picked out of the hat. And I don't think there's any Jeanettes here, so I'll pick Jeanette, you know, has come to the pastor. and is just so frustrated because the pastor has been working with her and trying to help her to control her overspending. But she has come and says, I don't know what in the world is wrong with me. I'm so disgusted with myself. What happened is I went through this budget with my husband and we were committed to living by it and I went to the store and as soon as I saw that item, I bought it. My lust took over. There wasn't even a struggle. What is the matter with me? The second scenario is all typical in Christian churches as well. Bobby had been struggling with pornography for several months and he had gotten caught and been confronted about it and he complained, you know, I have tried and I've tried and I've tried and I just cannot get over this temptation just seems too strong for me. I go onto the internet or I go off and I buy a pornographic magazine or something. And I feel terrible about it too. I want to conquer this, but I just have a difficult problem. A third scenario was hoping to get something from Calvin and Hobbes. You'd think as pagan as Calvin and Hobbes is, you know, there'd be some illustration there. But I had to pull out an old illustration I had in my file of Kathy. And you all know Kathy's constantly struggling with weight problems and breaking her diet and whatnot. And in the first caption, her friend are sitting together and her friend's looking over at her and, you know, just happy and she is just looking the picture of bliss. She's saying, yum, yum, yum, as she's chowing down on donuts. And the next caption says, why, why, why? 24 hours of willpower done in by one donut. Unbelievable. I keep thinking I'll change, and then I do the exact same thing. Every day, the exact same rut. I get up, give myself the big motivational speech, feel self-righteous for two hours, eat a donut. Why do I even bother with the preamble? Why not just get up, eat the donut, and be done with it? Why not just leave a box of donuts next to the bed so I won't have to waste the time getting up and pretending I'm going to try to not have one? Why not just go to sleep with a donut in my mouth so that I don't even have to bother waking up before I start chewing? And her friend says, why not just keep the donuts out of your house, Kathy? Kathy says, what? And let them think they're winning. Now, we'll get back to Kathy's response there because I think you immediately know she's not too serious about conquering this problem, but I think we can definitely sympathize with her. Why? Why? Why? Because we all have our own besetting sins. A besetting sin is a sin that's just something that gets us down. Maybe somebody else is not struggling with that, but it tends to get us down over and over again. It may be vanity. It may be gossip. It may be lust. It may be any number of things. And we just feel so disgusted with ourselves, you know, when we have fallen into that sin for the 20th or 30th or 100th time that we just say, what's the point? I might as well give up. I cannot continue struggling the way I have been struggling. And James recognizes your problem, and he gives step-by-step help in overcoming temptations. And we're going to next time be looking at some of those steps. I was hoping we could pull the whole sermon together, but I would not be able to do justice to the steps that we're going to be looking at next time. So we're going to... I'll just look at a few of the preliminary issues today. And high on the list of background information that I think is important to understand is that James says, hey, it is worthwhile. It is definitely worthwhile struggling against those temptations. He starts this section here by saying, blessed That means happy, happy is the man who endures temptation. Now we tend to think the exact opposite. We tend to think, you know, that it's such a misery and so painful to try to resist the temptation and so blissful to give in to the temptation that our minds become clouded on this. But James wants there to be no mistake about the fact you're going to have misery if you give in to your temptations. And when you conquer that temptation, you're going to feel on top of the world. You're going to enter into a blessed state, a happy state of victory through the Spirit. And I think this cartoon here shows it all. There's one caption of bliss followed by nine captions of unmitigated misery as she deals with her guilty conscience. And I think that's the way it is in sin all the time. I have seen marriages torn apart with one fling. You know, where the person went out and committed adultery and had happiness, one caption, and nine captions of misery that followed after that. And you wonder, why in the world would people do that? But when you're in the midst of the temptation, our thinking is clouded. It's so clouded on that. And so James says, hey, it is worthwhile. Now, it's not going to cause you to enter into joy just by not eating the proverbial spiritual donut, you know, whatever your donut is, because there are ways of avoidance that do not depend upon the Holy Spirit. The Pharisees were experts at avoiding certain problems, but they did not do it in the power of the Spirit. They did not have the joy of the Spirit. And as a consequence, they did not deal with the root issues. They only had an outward conformity that other people could achieve to. And when they didn't, they were very, you know, they'd look down their noses at those people. The people who are the most legalistic and the most holier than thou are the ones who have a truncated view of the law, you know, and how they think, hey, this is a piece of cake. You ought to be able to conquer this sin on no problem. Anyway, he uses the present tense here. He says, blessed is the man who endures. But then he indicates, hey, that blessing is not just going to be for right now. It's going to be throughout all of eternity. He says, for when he has been approved, And he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love him. So, for those who think, I just can't go through this, it's not really worthwhile to go through the struggles against temptation. He says, it is worthwhile, it is incredible blessing when you lay hold of doing things God's way. Now, James is not saying there is not a struggle. He makes no bones about the fact that there is a struggle that you are going to go through. And next week, we're going to be looking at some of the ways in which we fight against those fleshly struggles. You might be tempted, you know, to want to go into that right away. But I want us to, first of all, look at the enemy. And our temptation is to always see the enemy as being out there. It's my circumstances. It's my upbringing. It's, you know, Satan. Now, he's going to deal with satanic attack later on, but he didn't want you using that excuse. He says, the enemy really is something that is within. Like Pogo says, the enemy is us. And we're going to be seeing in what way that is the case. I think we tend to put our blame on upbringing, genes, anything except for taking the responsibility ourselves. And any time that we do that, we're actually blaming God. If you only knew my circumstances, you wouldn't blame me for having done whatever it was that he did. What you're saying is that God has put me into circumstances where I can't help but sin. The only choices I have are sin, sin, or sin. I did not have a way of escape. And that's a total contradiction of what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10, 13. He says, he so controls your circumstances, he guarantees always to make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it. And so we can't use that. James is saying the same thing here. He is saying, look, I don't want you saying God tempted me. Don't any man say, God tempted me. God is on your side. God is for your maturity. God has made the ways of escape. God is doing everything that you need, and he's provided everything that you need to be able to grow in maturity in Christ Jesus. And that's the temptation all the time, right from the time of Adam and Eve. What did Adam say? He says, the woman You got it. The woman whom you gave to be with me. She gave me the tree to eat, right? Lord, if you hadn't messed up by giving me a defective woman, I would have been okay. I wouldn't have sinned if it wasn't for her. What does she do? She puts the blame on Satan. And James doesn't even mention Satan in this passage here. Now, Satan is behind the scenes working, and later on, we're going to be talking about spiritual warfare and its importance in our growth and maturity. But at this point, he says, I want you to deal with the inward enemy first, and the other enemies will fall in their own due time. And so here, he wipes away any excuses. He says, let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. Now, if you're a real thinker, you might be wondering in your head, now, wait a shake, and I've had a couple of people ask me about stuff like this, wait a shake, doesn't God control all your circumstances? Didn't he just finish saying earlier in this book that he is bringing trials into our lives? Wasn't God the one who put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil into the Garden of Eden? I mean, he put it right where Adam and Eve probably could not have missed it. Wasn't that God putting a temptation before these people? Wasn't God the one who sent Jesus into the wilderness? It says He led Him into the wilderness, and Mark uses a stronger word, He drove Him into the wilderness to be tempted. And it's true, He did do that. But if you keep on reading, it says there, to be tempted by Satan. Now it's true, we have to recognize God was the one who made Jesus' body, and he made his body subject to temptations. It was able to get hungry, it was able to get thirsty. He had sleep, must have had incredible sleep deprivation sometimes, and so I'm sure there was an incredible longing to go to sleep at times. You look at the time, he was in that boat on the sea. He must have been unbelievably tired to have those waves washing over the boat, and he didn't wake up. You know, they have to shake him up, you know. Lord, wake up, we're going to drown. And so he had these desires. God put them into his life and Satan uses those things to try to tempt Christ. And actually, I should mention that Satan uses everything that God makes and tries to turn it into a temptation. And so it's not an issue where God is tempted. There's a difference between trials that God allows us to get into and Satan using them as a temptation in our lives. Same was true of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. Satan used what God had placed there to tempt Adam. God used it to test Adam. It was a big difference between testing. Testing is moving us to maturity. It's something that's good in our lives, whereas Satan intended it for evil. And so there's two people who can have the same circumstance. One goes through it victoriously, the other person false. Why is that the case? He is saying, don't look outwardly for the source of temptation. You're looking in the wrong direction. He's not even blaming Satan here. The key to understanding why we fall into sin does not come from your past, you know, getting psychoanalyzed as to whether you were potty trained right or not. It does not come from your circumstances, no matter how difficult they may be. It comes from within. So he says in verse 14, But each one, there is no exceptions here whatsoever, he says, each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. It's by his own desires. Temptation cannot even exist apart from your desires. There wouldn't even be a temptation. Just as an example, if you were on a diet and I was to dangle chocolate in front of you and say, oh, wouldn't you like to break your diet and have some of this chocolate? If you didn't like chocolate, you say, get out of here, Kaiser. I mean, it's just not even tempting to you at all. Now, there's nothing wrong with eating the chocolate, right? We've said in life, the avoidance principle is not the way to deal with things. But the issue here is, if there's no desire in that person, there's going to be no temptation when you put the thing in front of him. Somebody else may be tempted, but he will not. And so it feeds on the desire, that desire that is within us. And so sanctifying our desires under the ministry of the Holy Spirit is a very, very important process in our maturity. We're going to be looking at that next week. But I think it's important to understand Christ had desires too. He could not have been tempted if He did not have desires. Hebrews says He was tempted in all points, just like we are, yet without sin. If Jesus did not have desires, there is no way Satan could have tempted Him. And so that's why it's important to distinguish in James here between desire and sin. Take a look at verse 15. It says, then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. So there's a step in between the desire and the sin. There's illicit whatever that brings conception and then brings on the sin. So there's a distinction between the desire and the sin. Okay, desire has to conceive and then it brings forth sin. And so I think it's very important that we understand desires on their own are not the sin. Did Christ have desires? Well, I've already mentioned he had hunger, he had thirst, he had sleepiness. Satan's suggestion in the wilderness, you know, to turn those stones into bread, which he was able to do with a miracle, no problem. But what it was doing, it was appealing to his hunger. He had been fasting for 40 days. Luke 4 says he was hungry. Hunger is a very strong physical desire. And if God had not made him with those natural desires, there's no way that Satan could have even tempted him. Now, we're going to be seeing that Satan takes natural good desires and he makes them unnatural and he turns them into sinful desires. But at this point, we're just dealing with the issue of how he appeals to inbuilt desire. God gave a desire to Adam and Eve to take dominion. That's a godly desire. It's a good desire. And He appeals to that desire for, here's a desire of the soul, not of the body now, but of the soul of Christ, to take dominion when He offers them all the kingdoms of this world if He will bow down and worship Him. And again, there's nothing wrong with our desires, but we need to make sure that they are being used rightly before the Lord. By the way, What Satan was doing there is he was trying to get Christ to take a good desire, but to put it into a wrong motive, goal, and standard. Remember, we've brought that up before. For any action to be a righteous action, it has to have the right motive, the right goal, and the right standard. So it can have all three wrong or part of them right and part of them wrong. Satan always is trying to get you into sin, taking a good thing and giving it the wrong motive, goal, and standard. Genesis 3 tells us that the fruit of the forbidden tree was beautiful to look upon. It was pleasant to the eyes and it was desirable. It appealed to desire. God has put within men desires for beauty and taste and aroma. They are all perfectly legitimate. Our problem is we have gotten so used to not having our desires controlled by the Holy Spirit. That's the issue. And we're going to be spending quite a bit of time next week looking at some of the ways in which we can place our desires under the control of the Spirit. What does it mean to walk in the Spirit? I hear we're just describing how the principle works. When Christ went into the desert, it says He was filled with the Holy Spirit, and His response to that bodily desire, to that temptation, is to say, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. He's saying, my desires have a master. They don't go to the, you know, it's not every, it's not the desire that's the master, it's the Lord that's the master. And God does not make us take away all desire. What he does is he has us transform our desires to a spiritual direction and enjoy those desires far more than any unbeliever could ever enjoy them. What we tend to do, we go to one of two extremes. We either give up and think we can't control our desires. Well, we can't in a sense, the spirit does. Or we go to the other extreme and we say that all desire is wrong. No, desire is not wrong. God wants our desires harnessed to the Holy Spirit and serving him with all of our might. We'll maybe spend some time later on in the book of James showing some of the practical implications of that. Galatians 4, James chapter 4 talks about the Holy Spirit yearning jealously for our desires. Galatians 5 uses the same words. Some people say, okay, epithumia, you know, it's a word that just talks about sinful desire. No. Jesus had epithumia. You know, Paul commanded epithumia. It's just a strong longing, a strong yearning, a strong desire. The Holy Spirit desires our desires. You know, there's this tug of war between the flesh and the Spirit. 1 Peter 2.11 says that because our sin nature, those desires are now used to war against the soul. And those are the desires that give ruin to the Christian unless the Spirit has mastery. Now again, I don't want you to have the idea that James is utterly unsympathetic to the things that you are going through. He's going to be very sympathetic and speak about how impossible the Christian life is to live, apart from the spirits working in you. And our temptation always is to think, if you only knew the struggles I was going through, you wouldn't blame me. You wouldn't blame me, right? Well, there's a Greek word in verse 14, that indicates each person's desires and their temptations are unique, and God knows that, and Satan knows it. But he says, each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Now, you can see it in the English. It's not as strong as in the Greek. Here's what a commentary says. It is the same word from which the first part of our term, idiosyncrasy, comes. You know, an idiot comes from it too, but idio. Idiosyncrasies are those personalized habits of an individual that are unique to him alone. James is saying that each of us has desires peculiar to himself that lure him into certain sorts of sin. And so James is saying, hey, I understand that some of you women have a much harder time than other women during your period and being nice to your husbands, but by God's spirit, you can still conquer that temptation to wring his neck, okay? That's what he's saying. I understand each person's got his own besetting sins and their own unique struggles, but by God's Spirit, you can conquer that. And he's going to go on later on in this book to speak about some of the besetting sins that people in that congregation had. With some, it's anger. With some, it's a desire for the approval of men. You know what your besetting sin is. but you need to understand the enemy. You need to understand what are my weaknesses, where are my desires weak, where they need to be cloaked in the armor of the Lord, where I will not be taken in by Satan. And again, I wish I had time to do the whole sermon together, but we won't be able to do that. But look at Roman numeral two, verse 14. James uses two fishing terms in the Greek to illustrate the terrible dangers of being naive to our desires. And you know, it just, it is remarkable how naive some people are to the weaknesses of their flesh. Maybe it's not naivete, maybe it's just self-deception. I had one guy ask me, you know, to all appearances, this is a godly Christian. He asked me, Phil, there's really nothing wrong is there with me spending the evening with my girlfriend in a, what's the heated pools called, with the whirl thing in there, the spa. And I said, where are you going to do that? And he says, well, it's in her bedroom. Are there going to be other people there? No, it's just going to be the two of us. And I'm thinking to myself, idiot, you know, of course it's wrong to do something like that. Don't you understand how your flesh can so easily fall into sin? But he was just saying, you know, I don't see anything wrong, you know. And what James is going to get at is before there even is any sin, there are dangers around, okay? And it's because of the weakness of the way we have been made with the desires that we have. And so let's take a look at these fishing terms that are on here. You know, some fish have been caught enough times before, man, you can't get them onto a hook no matter what. They're very wary. And there's other fish, man, they bite onto anything. First fishing term used. is ex el comenos, or you got the shortened version there. It's used of a fisherman who's caught a fish, he's got him on the line, and he's pulling that line in. Okay, so he's drawing him in. The second word, del adzomenos, and I think I put the shortened version into yours, is where the fish has actually been grabbed in the hand, or you could say he's been netted, netted into the boat. But he starts off his discussion before those two terms with our key word, desire. You're never going to catch a fish unless you catch that fish's desire. Fishermen, they understand that language, you know. No problems. You're going to get a lure that you know is just suited to the desire of that fish. And Satan knows your desires inside and out. He knows just which lure to put before you. Now, Job stopped Satan at the point of his desires. He knew what his weaknesses were. And if you read through Job, there's a number of different weaknesses that he was guarding against. One of them was the sins of sexual temptation. And he said, I have set a guard before my eyes that I will not gaze upon a woman to look at her lustfully. Okay? If we don't set guards before our eyes or guards against Satan's entrapments, we're fools, according to the Scripture. We are fools. He says, we need to be on guard against the wiles of the devil because he is a master fisherman. In the cartoon of Kathy, You know, her roommate asks her why she didn't just keep the donuts out of the room and she says, what? And let them think that they're winning. You can see already she's not really serious about dealing with this sin because she's nuzzling with sin. You know, just sidling up to, I'm not sinning. You know, I just, I'm just, you know, I have the liberty to get this close. And then when they fall, they're all crying and bemoaning the fact that they have fallen. But if they hadn't been nuzzling with sin in the first place, they wouldn't have had that. And I should point out, that there's more to it than just fleeing from sin. We do need to take evasive action, we do need to run, but next week we're going to be looking at the ways to weaken the desires of the flesh so that we're not constantly having to flee hither and yon. We can weaken the desires of the flesh, but he says, when Satan is dangling something in front of your eyes that you can feel those desires rising up, he says, flee. Flee from those lusts. Take evasive action immediately. Make a contingency plan. And if you guys don't have contingency plans, I can give you a sheet that helps you to work out. What are the contingency plans for me when I get tempted by my besetting sin? Here's the action steps. And you immediately know in your head which action steps you need to take. And sometimes they're way ahead of time that you need to take it. I've talked to businessmen who have said, you know, my besetting sin is sexual and I am so tempted when I go to a motel room to turn on the TV to watch things that I should not be watching. And he says, what I do is I call the hotel, My wife there, you know, in the hotel when I'm reserving, I call the hotel, tell them, hey, make sure there isn't any TV that can get into that room and if you can't accommodate me, I'll find a hotel that will. And then he'll also, if he can't do that, he will call up a friend and he'll say to his friend, I want you to call me about 9 o'clock tonight and ask me what I'm doing. And then tomorrow morning, I want you to ask me if I've kept myself pure. He was recognizing what his weaknesses were and he was putting hedges in the way of falling into that sin. And we'll maybe look a little bit more at that later on. But that's the desire stage. The next stage is where we've already bit onto the lure and we are being drawn along by that fishing line. And while Satan is drawing us into his boat, God graciously allows us to get off that hook over and over again. But God says, if you keep biting that hook, eventually you are going to get caught and you're going to get handed over to Satan. You're going to be put into his boat. And he talks about death here. There were people in Corinth who were weak, some who were sick, some who had already died because of their sins against the Lord. He speaks of Hymenaeus and Alexander who had been handed over to Satan, he says, for the destruction of the flesh that the spirit may be saved in the day of judgment. He was a believer. But what had happened? He had gone so far that God says, you're no longer any use to me. I'm going to make sure your flesh is destroyed so that your spirit might be saved in the day of judgment. And I believe that's the kind of death that he is talking about in verse 15. Not eternal death, but I think it's talking about physical death. Why don't you turn with me to 1 John 5. We'll look at a few passages that deal with this concept. This may be totally new to you. But just think with me on what is going on here. 1st John 5 and verse 16. He says, if anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask and he will give him life for those who commit. What does that imply? He will give him life. It means even on these sins that are not sins to death, If he repents, he will be given life. What does that imply? It implies that that was heading to death as well. I believe that all sins that Christians willfully and perpetually engage in, all sins lead down the path to death. And we can break that at any point until we get to the point of no return. And that's what he calls here, the sin unto death, where you can't even pray about it. He says, he will give him life for those who commit sin, not leading to death. There is sin leading to death. I do not say that he should pray about that. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin not leading to death. Okay, so there is sins that are not... Okay, you don't have the death sentence on you. And I'll give you a few other scriptures that deal with this concept. But all sins... When you repent, you're restoring a sinner from the, James later on says, from the way of destruction, you're saving him from death. All sin eventually will lead there, but it can be stopped at any point. There comes a point of no return where even in a believer's life, it doesn't matter how many times you pray, how many times you appeal for forgiveness, how many other people appeal to you, you're already sentenced to death. It's a sin unto death. Okay, does that make sense? Now, I'm going to give a few other scriptures as we look at that, but it's basically like Hymenaeus and Alexander. They've been netted into Satan's boat. And I do want to, one more verse on that first John 5 passage, and that's down at verse 18. This is the encouragement. He says, we know that whoever is born of God does not sin. And that's an ongoing tense. He doesn't keep on sinning perpetually, willfully against the Lord. But he who has been born of God keeps himself or guards himself, literally, and the wicked one does not touch him. And so, if you're following the strategies that James gives as to how to guard your life, he says, Satan can't touch you. There is nothing he can do to drag you into his boat. He may be able to afflict you, he may be able to do all kinds of things, but he will not capture you. He will not be able to get you into his boat. But not all believers have that promise. It's the one who guards himself. And that's what this week and next time we're going to be talking about is how is it that we can keep ourself, that we can guard ourself and fail, you know, stop going down that highway into death. Now, with that concept of death, let's turn back to James chapter 1 and verse 15. Here, James switches metaphors in midstream. He starts with the metaphor of fishing, and then he goes on to the metaphor of reproduction. It says, then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. Now, if the New King James translation is correct, what he's doing is he's giving two generations here. There is the conception of sin, then it's brought to term, there's birth. The one that's born grows up, and there's conception, and then something else's death is brought to birth. And that's a possible translation, a possible way you could take it where it's drawn out over time. I don't believe that's the correct translation, and there are other translations that take the whole thing as in one generation, J. Adams and others. I'll look at it this way. The Greek term tic-tac can have two meanings. It can be translated as to give birth, but it can also mean to carry a child, to bear a child. And I think that the second meaning is a better one. Otherwise, you have two births, and it really makes it awkward. Here's how one person renders it, I mean, one version. Moreover, when death has conceived, it bears sin, and sin, when it is fully developed, in other words, when it's brought to term, gives birth to death. And so there's a progress of sin over a period of time. It starts off by giving in to that desire in the mind. That's what's happening. It's in the mind. Sin is a matter of inner assent to wrong desire. And so you dwell on the item, you begin to think about carrying out that item. Maybe you're thinking about, you've got bitterness in your heart that you've allowed to go on there. You begin to dwell on thoughts of mean things happening to this person. Maybe murder happening to this person. Even though it's hidden in the heart, Jesus says it is murder. It's murder in the heart. Or maybe you think about sleeping with somebody that is not your wife or with your husband. Jesus calls that adultery in the heart. And it's in the heart that we need to be focusing where this conception of this inner monster begins to happen. James points out, just as you cannot see physical conception you cannot see the conception of sin because it's hidden. It's there, it's within, but you cannot see it. And if you want to prevent this spiritual pregnancy, as it were, you've got to prevent it before conception. That's what he's saying. And you prevent it in the secret places of the mind. Now, just to anticipate next week's solution, one point of the solution, verse 21 tells us that the Word of God must be implanted in our minds so that sin is not implanted in our minds. Again, it's a reproduction metaphor there. that the scriptures need to be implanted. They need to be conceived in our minds so that sin is not conceived in our minds. And let me tell you, meditation on the scriptures and the use of the scriptures that are specifically pointed to Satan is one of the most powerful tools against temptation. It's incredible. It's something we need to do. We need to have that word stored in our heads. In fact, later on, we're going to be singing a part of Psalm 119. Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sit against thee. How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to your word. And then two verses later, it was that other one. So that's the conception. We need to deal with it on the inner place. After conception, what happens? Well, sin begins to grow and to grow. It never remains static. It never remains static. You can't fool around with sin two or three times and say, oh, I'll just drop it, you know, just be a short episode with sin. No, what you're doing is you are feeding that monster that has been conceived within and it grows and grows and it becomes harder and harder to resist that temptation. You're either going forward or you're going backward. And this monster of sin, if it's not being dealt with, is eventually going to be born, it's going to come out of secret, and it's going to give birth to death. That's the final logical end of every temptation. You slide down the slippery slope into death. And there's a ton of scriptures that talk about this. In fact, there's an entire essay that talks about the sin unto death relating to our physical death, God taking us out. Galatians 6, 7 through 8 says, Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption. He's talking about the corruption of this physical body, the destruction of this physical body. You reap what you sow. Why does 1 Corinthians 10 through 11 talk so much about Christians who have been weakened, sickened, and eventually died? Why does 1 John speak of certain sins being unto death? Or 2 Samuel 12 indicate that David, here's a man who's dearly loved by the Lord, and yet it says there he was in imminent danger of death. It's because God has placed in this world laws of harvest, and those laws of harvest are going to come to rest. Now, the thing I praise the Lord for is that he lets us off the hook when we repent at any place along the stage until who knows when, that sin unto death comes, when it's too late. He says, no, I'm fed up with you. I want to sanctify you. There is no more going to sanctify you in heaven. Nathan said, the Lord also has put away your sin. You shall not die. He said that to David after the sin with Bathsheba. When he says, you shall not die, what does that imply? It was an imminent danger of dying. Doesn't it imply that? And yet because of his repentance, he completely went off that slippery slope down the road to death, physical death. And so it's incredible forgiveness, but that does not mean that the laws of harvest were done away with, because that monster had already been conceived within. And so God says to him, you did this in secret, I'm gonna do it in open. You sowed the seeds of adultery, You're going to reap in your family all kinds of adultery in your children. You sowed the seeds of murder. The sword is not going to leave your household. That's the laws of harvest that are coming to roost. Now, God limited the laws of harvest because of that repentance. And he says, you shall not die, which would have been his harvest. Once sin is conceived, it's like planting dandelions. You know there's going to be a multiplied increase of dandelions wherever they go. And so dealing with our desires is so critical if we're to work on maturity. That's one of the reasons why I've been harping on those of you who did not come to the men's meeting to go through that biblical EQ book. Get a copy and study through it and I don't agree with everything Edmiston says On how to sanctify our emotions to the Lord but there's a wealth of biblical material and how to walk in the spirit and how to have our Emotions more and more in tune with what the spirit wants us to do. So I highly recommend that as supplemental reading to this series, but it's not just the gross, socially unacceptable desires he wants us to work on. Irresponsibility, laziness, gossip, they're just as hideous. And what I want you to do as we end here, I want you to turn with me to 2 Samuel chapter 11, and I want you to see what it was that led David into this sin with Bathsheba. And I think it'll help you to appreciate why James focuses so much on the desire. His temptation with Bathsheba did not come out of the blue. It started much earlier. 2 Samuel chapter 11. Now, usually people start this story with verse 2. The writer of this book starts the sin with verse 1, and that's really where it belongs. It happened in the year, excuse me, it happened in the spring of the year at the time when kings go out to battle that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they destroyed the people of Ammon, et cetera. But notice that first phrase, it happened in the spring of the year at the time when kings go out to battle. David is not out there in battle. What's going on here? Let me give a bit of background. God, in his rules of warfare, commanded that the kings be out there on the battlefield with their people. They were supposed to share in the risks. They were supposed to share in the dangers and the sacrifices that were being made by their men. And I think that if our presidents were forced to go onto the battlefield right with their men, there'd probably be a lot less wars in America, but that's beside the point. David was supposed to be out there fighting. He was not. He had become lazy. In Job 29, verse 25, Job sees a king as dwelling in the midst of his army. He sees that as a sign of righteousness. David was failing already right there. And our first response is to excuse David and think, you know, he's put in a lot of time. He was out in the battlefield all of his life earlier, and he needs a break. He's king. You know, he can relax. If he wants to watch TV, let him watch TV. If he wants to sleep in, let him sleep in. And our tendency is to not see that as very serious. We get upset with verses 2 and following. But what was happening is that David was giving in to the self-life on little issues before he gave in to the self-life with Bathsheba. He just, in his little comfort areas, when you fail to say no, to those little areas of self-discipline, what happens is you are feeding a monster. And that monster keeps growing and growing. And over time, you have no ability to resist that monster. And he didn't even realize that the spirit had left him. One of the ministries that has had tremendous success in helping people overcome sexual addictions, including homosexuality and pedophilia, addictions to pornography, is Pure Life Ministries in Kentucky. And they have pointed out over and over that most ministries that deal in this area do not go adequately after the self-life. They're dealing with controlling behavior. They're dealing with controlling outward circumstances. And that only goes so far. But he says they fail to go after the inward life. And he's got all kinds of biblical steps. In fact, ones that aren't even brought up in James chapter 1. It's not an exhaustive list we're going to look at next time. But fasting is one, for example. Every person who is addicted in some sexual way, He makes them engage in fasting on a regular basis. And you might wonder, what in the world would fasting have any relationship whatsoever with those other sexual sins? It has a huge relationship. Because what you are doing is in a controlled, safe environment where you know what's going to happen. You know exactly what your body is going to be telling you. You are putting your body into a position where you are starving it and the body is saying, give me, give me, give me. And you're saying, no, no, no. And you're controlling the response. You're starving out the impulses to have desires, just give free reign. And you're putting them under the control of the Holy Spirit and gaining a hunger for God. And so, he's got a number of ways in which he's attacking the inward impulses toward sin. And so, there's a simple lifestyle. self-denial, financially, socially, recreationally, in a number of different areas. And he points out, if you don't go after the inward heart, you're never going to conquer the problem. You know, Alcoholics Anonymous is that way. They're just trying to control the circumstances and they know that they can't help people permanently. They say, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. The best that they can do is control your circumstances and you probably won't fall into sin. If that's as far as we go, we're Pharisees. We have to go way beyond that into the power of the Holy Spirit working from within. And I think it is hypocrisy when people will speak against drunkenness, but they engage in gluttony because it's exactly the same root principle that's leading to the gluttony has led to the drunkenness in the first place. And so again, we've got to go after the inward monster. It was selfishness that led to the sin with Bathsheba. It was selfishness that led Solomon into every imaginable kind of sin. And if you live the lifestyle of Solomon, And you are not careful. You are going to end up with the sins of Solomon. Self-indulgence. Now, you don't have to. You can be wealthy and not do that, but this is why wealthy people find it so easy to fall away from the Lord. It's because it's so easy to gratify. Abraham was wealthy, and he walked close to the Lord, but it's so easy. But let me just give you one example. The founder of that Pure Life Ministries said that when he gave in, even in what seems like totally unrelated areas of his life, I'll give you one example he gives. He says this one time he was pigging out on sweets. instead of moderately eating sweets. Nothing wrong with sweets, you know, but he was pigging out on them. And immediately he began to notice a lowering of resistance in his sexual sense. And he immediately corrected before anything happened, but he was thinking, wow, that is so strange. I immediately begin to find this temptation when I'm giving in on another area. Why? Well, there's two reasons. Number one, he's been grieving the spirit in this area, and so he does not have the empowering of the spirit to conquer in the other area. but he's also been feeding the monster within, feeding it over here and it begins to take over all of the other areas of life. Okay? And so true sanctification, when you find a person really growing, not in a Pharisaic way, but in a Christian way, you find them growing and maybe conquering some alcoholism or whatever, drunkenness is the better word. What you amazingly find is that almost every area of their lives begins to grow in sanctification. You cannot just separate it out. We are whole people and the whole of us needs to grow. Maybe you give in on just doing whatever. You come home, slump down, watch TV. No, you need to schedule that TV. You need to schedule your recreation. You need to schedule your eating. If you just do what comes naturally, it's going to be bad because what comes naturally tends to be not the right thing. What I want you to do, even though we don't have the time today to get into the specific steps that James gives on how to conquer sin, what I want you to do over this next week is to say to the Lord, Lord, I give you my desires. And I want these desires to be sanctified. And I want to sacrifice them to you so that you own all my desires. I have no rights. You have purchased them with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I give you all my rights. You can protect them better than I can. And Lord, what you want me to have, I rejoice in in the book of James. And if you can do that, I think the Lord will honor you. I think you're going to find his blessing, his joy creeping into your heart and overflowing into the lives of others. So let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we thank you for your word. as feeble as my lips have been in articulating it, I pray that this word would grip onto the lives of the youngest to the oldest. Father, that each one of us would learn what it means to grow in sanctification, and not to do it by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but to do it in the ways that you have ordained, to flow in the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit, to experience true holiness by having our hearts conquered to King Jesus, and we submit our lives to you. We thank you that you bloodied us when you brought us to Christ, and you subdued us to yourself, and we gladly, Father, submit ourselves now in our sanctification. If we need any bloodying of our flesh, take out your sword, Lord Jesus, and cut it out. Cut it out. We want to be holy, and we want to be out and out for you. But Father, I pray that the healing And the ministry of your Holy Spirit would also be poured into our lives so that we could enter into that joy, indescribable and full of glory that Peter talks about and that James talks about. And fill this people, Father, with your presence, your empowering. I pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.