Don't Waste Your Cancer

Tom Shrader opens by reading John Piper's essay 'Don't Waste Your Cancer,' using its ten points to summarize three weeks of teaching on trials from James 1 and showing how any suffering — illness, broken relationships, financial hardship — is designed by God for a purpose. He then turns to James 1:13-17, explaining that temptation arises not from God but from each person's own internal desires, which are lured by external bait until lust conceives sin and sin produces death. Shrader closes with a pointed application about natural desires — provision, success, material comfort — that quietly spiral beyond healthy limits and consume the life God intended for faith, family, and genuine relationships.

“Cancer does not win if you die. It wins if you fail to cherish Christ.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Blue Jean Theology (2006)

Recorded: 2006 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 51 min

Themes: suffering, temptation, cancer, trials, sin, desire, endurance, contentment, facing illness, struggling with greed, financial hardship, cancer diagnosis, feeling spiritually dry, new believer, middle age, dealing with broken relationships

Scripture: James 1:2-17, Genesis 3:8-12, Romans 8:1, Galatians 3:13, Psalm 84:11, 2 Corinthians 1:9, Psalm 20:7, Ecclesiastes 7:2, Psalm 90:12, Philippians 3:8, Philippians 1:21, Daniel 11:32, Psalm 1:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:13, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Isaiah 6:3, Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8, Job 2:7, Job 2:10, Job 42:11, 2 Peter 2:14, Luke 21:12, Philippians 4:19, 1 Timothy 5:8, Ecclesiastes 5:10, Proverbs 27:12

Theological Themes: hamartiology, sanctification, theodicy, concupiscence, sin nature, providence, perseverance, James 1

Full Transcript

Introduction: A Letter Written on the Eve of Surgery

Please turn in your Bibles to the book of James, verses 13 through 17. I want to do something highly unusual to begin today. I want to read something to you that is three pages long. That is always dangerous for a couple of reasons: it is hard to listen to something that long, and I am not the world's greatest reader. But the reason I want to share this with you is that I think it is a great summary of what we have been looking at.

We have spent three weeks looking at the first twelve verses of the book of James. We have been talking a great deal about trials. We said that we are to count it all joy when we encounter various trials, because we know that the testing of our faith produces endurance. In our lives, we have these trials and we cannot avoid them. In fact, here is what Scripture says: don't avoid them. You don't want to avoid them. They are sent by design to provide you and me endurance — the ability to hang in there.

Trials test our faith. They expose our faith for what it really is. They allow us to see either the depth of that faith, or they reveal areas where we need to grow. So we welcome these trials as friendly visitors. We count them joy.

What I want to read to you today is a letter that John Piper posted on his website this week. Many of you are familiar with John Piper, and many of you who are familiar with him know he has cancer and had prostate surgery this week. I will give you the end of the story first: the surgery was pretty successful, by the initial results, so they will continue treatments and strategies. That is a good thing.

The night before he went into surgery, he wrote this letter. It is on his website, and I want to give you that web address because I sense you will want to download this letter, keep it, and return to it again and again. His website is desiringgod.org.

Applying This Beyond Cancer

While Piper is talking specifically about cancer, the reason I am spending this time with his letter is not because it is only about cancer. You could take out the word cancer and put in any other trial we have discussed. He makes ten points that seem to me excellent in every respect. I also find it so encouraging that I don't think you will hear anything and say, "Wow, that's completely new." It is very encouraging to me when people from other churches recommend this article and I go to it and find that it reflects, I think, what we teach here all the time. But we can never hear this enough, especially in the midst of trials and difficulties.

As the word cancer appears in this letter, it may not be cancer for you. It may be a broken relationship, a lost job, a child in rebellion. It may be someone who is single and wants to be married, or someone who is married and wants to be single. Whatever your trial is, you are going to have to do a little work and apply this to your life. I will take some time along the way to make comments where I think they are appropriate.

The Letter: Don't Waste Your Cancer

*February 15, 2006. I write this on the eve of prostate surgery. I believe in God's power to heal by miracle and by medicine. I believe it is right and good to pray for both kinds of healing. Cancer is not wasted when it is healed by God. He gets the glory, and that is why cancer exists. So not to pray for healing may waste your cancer. But healing is not God's plan for everyone. There will be many other ways to waste your cancer, and I am praying for myself and for you that we will not waste this pain.*

So there is the background. Piper is going to give us ten ways that we could waste a cancer experience — ten ways you could waste your trial, ten ways you could waste this hurt and this pain in your life.

Point One: Don't Waste It by Doubting God's Design

*Number one: you will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God. It will not do to say that God only uses cancer but does not design it. When God permits, He permits for a reason, and the reason is His design. If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, He can stop it or not. If He does not, He has a purpose. Since He is infinitely wise, it is right to call this purpose a design. Satan is real and causes many pleasures and pains, but he is not ultimate. So when he strikes Job with boils — Job 2:7 — Job attributes it ultimately to God — Job 2:10 — and the inspired writer agrees — Job 42:11 — "they comfort him for all the evil that the Lord had brought against him." If you do not believe your cancer is designed for you by God, you will waste it.*

Here is what we say all the time: God either causes or allows everything in your life. If you have this cancer, you have it for a reason. God could have stopped it, and He chose not to. I don't think it is particularly important to try to figure out the why of that and become absorbed in it, but it is important to understand that God has given you this for a purpose, for a reason.

It is very fashionable now to talk about our purpose in life and the idea that we are here for a reason. You will hear it said that everything happens for a reason. If that is true, then there has to be something more than chance driving it. If everything has purpose and reason, then there must be someone orchestrating it — someone who is in control — and that is God. Whatever trial has entered your life, it is there for a reason.

Count it all joy when you encounter these various, multicolored, inevitable trials that arrive unexpectedly. I guarantee you that in the flesh, you would have never chosen them. But they are there, and you welcome them as friends. You do not resist them as intruders.

Don't Waste Your Cancer (Part 2 of 8)

Point Two: Believing Cancer Is a Curse and Not a Gift

You'll waste your cancer if you believe it is a curse and not a gift. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," Romans 8:1. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us," Galatians 3:13. "The Lord is a sun and shield. The Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does He withhold from those who walk upright," Psalm 84:11.

God has given you the gift of cancer, the gift of pain, the gift of a trial as part of His great purpose. God is allowing you to deal with this to see who you really are, to see what you are really made of, to see how deep your faith really is. So I do not resist it as an intruder, but I welcome it as a friend.

Point Three: Seeking Comfort from Your Odds Rather Than from God

You'll waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God. The design of God in your cancer is not to train you in the rationalistic human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds, but not Christians. Some count their chariots — percentages of survival. Some count their horses — side effects of treatment. But we must trust in the name of the Lord, Psalm 20:7.

God's design is clear to us from 2 Corinthians 1:9: "We felt that we had received a sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." The aim of your cancer, among a thousand other good things, is to knock the props out from under your heart so you will rely utterly on Him.

I can speak with some firsthand experience when it comes to this cancer thing. We have been through this now for about sixteen to eighteen months, and I remember the statistical process all along. It never seemed to be in our favor. The type of cancer Susan got was a form of breast cancer that only one percent of women who contract breast cancer ever get, and the survival rate on that cancer was, ten years ago, one percent.

There are always odds, and it is remarkable how everyone I talk to seems to have two questions: How is Susan doing, and what is the prognosis? What do they say? What are the odds? It is so easy to start looking to those things for encouragement. Even if they say the survival rate is ninety percent, that still means one in ten die — and I will tell you, as someone involved in it, you immediately think you are the one in ten.

We waste our affliction if we are trying to figure out the odds and miss the fact that God is doing something marvelous in our life. Sometimes that is the only way we will hear Him — He just kicks everything else away. I remember talking with a young man whose father is one of the truly successful men in Phoenix. The young man is a believer; his father is not. I asked about his father and said, "How come he is not a Christian? Why hasn't he seen this?" The young man said, "My father has no needs. If he wants something, he can buy it. He has never really encountered a difficulty he could not overcome."

One of the great things about trials — and the deeper the trial, the better; the deeper the hurt, the better — is that they teach me I have a profound need, and that need is not to pull up some power within myself, but to rely on God and to say that He is writing the story. It may have a different ending than the one I would choose, but nonetheless it is God's plan, and so I embrace it.

Susan and I have had many of these conversations over the last year and a half. There is never a good time to die. We always have something else we need to do. Susan wanted to live to see our grandson, and she did. But I said to her, "You understand that is never going to be enough, because then you will want to see him walk, then go to school, then hit his first home run, then drive a car, then date, then get married, then see his children." There is never really a good time to die, and we can become so focused on death that we waste the life that is right here.

I know this may sound cold or calculated or uncaring, but it is not — it is as loving as I know how to say it. Even if Susan is healed from the cancer, something else is going to get her one day. That is simply the way it is. You can become so absorbed with the cancer, so absorbed with the circumstances, that you fail to see God has given you this gift. Use it.

Point Four: Refusing to Think About Death

You'll waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death. We will all die if Jesus postpones His return, and not to think about what it would be like to leave this life and meet God is folly. "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind and the living will lay it to heart," Ecclesiastes 7:2. How can you lay it to heart if you will not think about it?

"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom," Psalm 90:12. Numbering your days means thinking about how few they are and that they will end. How will you gain a heart of wisdom if you refuse to think about it?

Does thinking about death sound morbid? I hope not. To think about death and understand its absolute certainty does not make it something to dread, something to run away from, or something to ignore. Rather, it becomes something that gives motivation for the rest of life.

Numbering Our Days

Teach us to number our days aright. It is one of the verses we use every year in our year-end review and preview: help us to number our days aright so we gain a heart of wisdom, so we begin to understand life when we understand our days are finite. You would be a fool to go through this life without the constant awareness that your life is temporary, and to not begin to live according to that. You only have so many days — some of you may have that many, some of you that many, some of you that many. It doesn't matter. It is all finite, and you would be a fool if you wasted them.

Point Five: Cherishing Christ Over Staying Alive

You will waste your cancer if you think beating cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ. Satan's design and God's design in your cancer are not the same. Satan's design is to destroy your love for Christ. God's design is to deepen your love for Christ.

Cancer does not win if you die. It wins if you fail to cherish Christ. God's design is to wean you off the breast of the world and feast you on the sufficiency of Christ. It is meant to help you say, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, therefore to live is Christ and to die is great gain." Philippians 3:8 and 1:21. There is no idea of beating this.

Point Six: Reading About God More Than About Cancer

You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God. It is not wrong to know about cancer — ignorance is not a virtue. But the zeal to know more and more about cancer at the lack of zeal to know God more and more is symptomatic of unbelief.

Cancer is meant to waken in us the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, "Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord God." It is meant to waken us to the truth of Daniel 11:32: "The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action." It is meant to make unshakable, indestructible oak trees out of us. Psalm 1:2 says, "His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers." What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.

Over the last year and a half, we have received literature this deep from friends — many of you, well intended and appreciated, mountains of material. Go to Google, type in breast cancer, hit search, and there are volumes of information. You can become so absorbed in the cancer that you forget to read about the Creator of the cancer. That is what a trial does, isn't it? You get into a trial and you are so absorbed trying to unpack it, figure it out, make sense of it, read about it, and understand it, that you fail to look up and see there is a God.

We have a new pulpit we have had now for about four weeks. One of the guys from the church made it — he didn't create it, he made it. He took machines and metal and parts, cut them and welded them and polished them, and he made a pulpit. Someone made this piano as well. It is a beautiful thing. But neither of them created anything. Here is what God did: God created the world. He didn't make it, He didn't assemble it — He created it from nothing. Here is how hard it was for Him: "Let there be light." And there was light. We have fifty guys working all day to get things done. He said, "Let there be light," and there it was. Don't you want to know that God? Don't you want to begin to plumb the depths of His mind? He gave you this book so you could. Get apprised of the disease, develop a strategy — but do not obsess over it.

Point Seven: Deepening Relationships Rather Than Retreating

You will waste your cancer if you let it drive you into solitude instead of deepening your relationships with manifest affection. When Epaphroditus brought the gift to Paul that was sent by the Philippian church, he became ill and almost died. Paul tells the Philippians, "He has been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill." What an amazing response. It does not say they were distressed that he was ill, but that he was distressed because they heard he was ill. That is the kind of heart God is aiming to create with cancer — a deeply affectionate, caring heart for people.

Do not waste your cancer by retreating into yourself. Along comes a deep hurt — it may be the death of a loved one, a physical trial, a broken relationship, whatever it is — do not run away. That is the time you need others most.

Point Eight: Grieving With Hope

You will waste your cancer if you grieve as those who have no hope. Paul uses this phrase in relation to those whose loved ones had died: "We do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope." 1 Thessalonians 4:13. There is a grief at death even for the believer — there is temporary loss of body, loss of loved ones here, loss of earthly ministry. But the grief is different. It is permeated with hope. "We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord." 2 Corinthians 5:8.

Do not waste your cancer grieving as those who have no hope. Listen — if the cancer doesn't get you, something else will. You are going to die, but that is not the end. That is the beginning. We sometimes have a false sense that we are in the land of the living and we are going to go to the land of the dead. It is exactly the opposite. We are in the land of the dead, and we die and go to the land of the living. This is not real living. Real living is perfect communion with God, and that is what we will have.

Don't Waste Your Cancer (Part 4)

We don't grieve as those who have no hope. Does that mean when we lose a loved one — when a baby dies, or a mate dies, or a friend dies — that our heart isn't broken and we don't grieve? Absolutely not. When I do a funeral for someone and there's a mom and the kids and the dad is dead, I will say all the time: don't for a second think you have this heart and this vacuum and this hole that's going to get fixed. It isn't. And that's really good. That's a picture of how deep your love was for this person.

Don't Treat Sin as Casually as Before

Number nine: you'll waste your cancer if you treat sin as casually as before. Are your besetting sins still as attractive to you as they were before cancer? If so, you're wasting your cancer. Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin. Pride, greed, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, impatience, laziness, procrastination — all these are the adversaries that cancer is meant to attack.

Don't just think of battling against cancer. Also think of battling with cancer. All these things are worse enemies than cancer. Don't waste the power of cancer to crush these foes. Let the permanence of eternity make the sins of this life look as futile as they are. "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"

Here's what this is saying: you are in the midst of the trial, and in the midst of the trial, you're pretty easy to negotiate with, aren't you? You're pretty prone to say, "God, if you get me through this, I will never..." Or, "God, you get me through this, and I'm telling you, you can count on me — you will have never seen anyone as on fire as I am for You." Or, "God, get me through this, and you're going to see dust fly and great things happen." And before long, you're through it, and you've had a life-changing experience that lasted seven and a half days — and you're right back at it.

Use Cancer as a Witness to the Glory of Christ

Number ten: you'll waste your cancer if you fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ. Christians are never anywhere by divine accident. There are reasons for why we wind up where we do. Consider what Jesus said about painful, unplanned circumstances in Luke 21:12: "They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness." So it is with cancer. This will be an opportunity to bear witness.

Christ is infinitely worthy. Here is the golden opportunity to show that He is worth more than life. Don't waste it. Remember, you are not left alone — you will have the help you need. Philippians 4:19: "My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus." That, signed by Pastor John, and his website is desiringgod.org.

It seems to me that's the perfect summation of what we've been talking about for three weeks. We want to be comfortable. We can't stand any sort of suffering or pain. When someone comes to you, the first thing you almost instinctively want to do is find a way to alleviate the pain, rather than perhaps go to the source of it — which may sometimes be sin. We'll find people who have made a series of stupid decisions — we're not talking about cancer now — a series of stupid decisions, and they begin to feel the weight of the consequences, and we will race to somehow eliminate the suffering because we're saying, "The suffering is bad." But no — there are consequences to our behavior. There are consequences to our behavior, and we have to live with those. And there is also, as we've been talking about, testing that we need to experience.

Trials, Temptation, and the Same Greek Word

By nature, we seek pleasure and avoid pain. That's why we don't go to the dentist. By very nature, I don't want to go there. I know I have a problem, I know I'm going to need work done, I know it's a lot of work, but it's going to hurt and I don't want to go.

Look at verse 13 of James 1. Here he uses a word that in the Greek is the same word translated "trials" in verse 2, "trial" in verse 12, and "tempted" in verses 13 and 14. It's the same word. In one sense it is neither negative nor positive — it simply means a testing or a proving. But in the present context of verse 13, it carries the idea of solicitation to evil. Same word: one use designed to show us what we really are, the other to cause us to fall or to stumble.

Here's what James writes: "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself does not tempt anyone." He's saying: when this temptation comes, don't you say that it's from God. We had Flip Wilson with his whole routine that said, "The devil made me do it." But what James is talking about here is something different. He's talking about the temptation that comes and the response of saying, "This somehow is from God."

The First Excuse: Adam in the Garden

Does that really happen? Put your finger right there and go all the way to the front of the book. The first encounter recorded for us in Genesis 3 is of man, God, and sin. God has been clear — we are not to eat from the fruit of the tree. Adam has eaten. Eve has eaten. In verse 8, they've hidden themselves. "They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees." And the Lord God said to the man, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked."

God is not searching here for information. God wants Adam to understand where he is and how he got there. God said to him, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" This is a really difficult circumstance when you get your arms around it. Adam has sinned. God has confronted him in his sin, and he has to come up with an excuse — and his finding an excuse is a little...

God's Holiness and the Origin of Temptation

It's hard for Adam to say, "It's my socioeconomic background, or the parents you gave me, or the chemicals in the food." Nonetheless, he is creative. He says, "The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the tree and I ate." Do you see what Adam is doing there? He is saying, "God, it's your fault. It's this woman that you gave me. Had you not done that, I would have never sinned." God then turns to the woman and says, "What is this you have done?" And she said, "It's the serpent. He deceived me." In essence, it's the same idea — the serpent you created.

You see why James is writing. Let's go back to James 1, verse 13. That's why he's saying, "Let no one say when I'm tempted, I'm being tempted by God." We can go all the way back to Adam and Eve and say that was certainly a flinch for many of us — temptation comes and we said it was God.

The phrase here, and the structure of the sentence, reads literally: "Let no one say to himself." This is you beginning to rationalize, explain away, or excuse the sin to yourself. This is the conversation that you have in the shower or in the car. You're there all by yourself, and you may even be speaking out loud, working through all of these gyrations, trying to explain this circumstance. If somebody were standing outside listening, they'd be laughing, or if they pull up next to you in the car and look over, you look like an idiot.

Here is the problem. We have a tendency, when we sin and when we are tempted, to say it's God. But the structure of these sentences is so powerful. When somebody is tempted, they should not say, "I'm being tempted by God." That word "by" can be interpreted as either direct or indirect, and it's all-encompassing in its nature. Don't say that God either directly or indirectly had anything to do with this temptation, because God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself doesn't tempt anyone with evil.

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is filled with your glory." — Isaiah 6:3. That's who God is. He is holy. He is other than. His holiness is eternal, not tainted in any way by any earthly thing or sin.

Every Good Gift Comes from Above

Look down at verse 17. It's as though verses 14, 15, and 16 are a little bit of a parenthesis. James is talking about the holiness of God and the goodness of God. Verse 17: "Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow." Every good thing in your life, all the good things that come into your life, are from Him. They are the perfect gift. He is the giver of good things. That cancer is a good gift to be embraced.

He is the Father of lights — an ancient Jewish term that speaks of God and His creation. He is the giver of light and life Himself. And there is no change in Him, no variation. "I, the Lord, do not change." — Malachi 3:6. "Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever." — Hebrews 13:8. This God is a good God.

Don't you for a second, in the midst of your temptation, say this temptation is from God. He cannot tempt you. He will not tempt you. He is not the giver of bad gifts and temptation. He is the giver of good gifts.

How Sin Actually Happens

Look back at verses 14, 15, and 16. What James gives us is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes, up-close, personal analysis of sin and how sin happens. Verse 14: "Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. And when lust is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death."

By casual reading alone, we can see something is going on. Look at the terms. "Each man" — it's universal. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." There is something inside of us, this lust, that is carried away or enticed or baited by something external. "Each one is tempted" is in the present tense — a continuing, repeated, inescapable reality of your life.

We are "carried away." The word carries with it the idea of being dragged away, compelled by an inner desire. It was used as a hunting term to refer to a baited trap designed to lure an unsuspecting animal. Or we are "enticed" — a term used frequently by fishermen talking about bait, whose purpose is to lure the prey and capture them. Peter uses the same word twice in his second letter: "Eyes full of adultery that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls." — 2 Peter 2:14.

The Illustration of the Lure

I like the imagery of lures and fishing. A skilled fisherman uses the right equipment — the right lure. I am not a skilled fisherman. I have fished once, well, twice now in my life, and the bait I used was cheese. The other options all looked like work. But I went online and typed in "lures," and of course I got a lot of results.

Here is just one — a promotional piece for a new product from Storm Enterprises, dateline Minnetonka, Minnesota. Just so you know, more Tonka trucks are produced in Minnetonka, Minnesota than any other city in the world. There's no limit to what you can learn here. The article says: "There's only one goal when it comes to fishing artificial bait — make the fish believe the hunk of plastic you're trolling is something to eat. With the new ultra-realistic Storm Wide-Eyed Live Series soft bait plastics, you just might fool yourself into thinking these lures are real live bait." The article quotes — and I am not making this up — a man named Mark Fisher.

The Devil's Tackle Box

He's saying the enemy uses these lures to entice us. He drops these lures — artificial. They look like the real thing. They look so real to you that you even bite on them. "Oh, that's real love. If I just had her, if I just had him, I'd be fulfilled. If I just had that, I'd be happy. If that Powerball ticket were in my pocket, I'd be a happy person."

Let me tell you a couple of things about the devil. Number one, he's a deceiver. He's a liar. And unlike me when I fish, he's not into catch and release. "Be of sober spirit. Be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."

I've only fished twice in my life, both just in the last year up in Flagstaff. Every time we caught a fish, we tried the best we could to send him back out. Once I didn't do a very good job — the fish had a hook in his eye and I couldn't get it out. I said, "You have a story for your friends, and that's a warning to the rest of you fish out there." He wasn't a floater, because I looked the next three days and never saw him come up, so I assume he's still out there. But he does need a tetanus shot.

The point is, I'm into catch and release. The devil is not. Just listen to the language people use when something has them. They'll say things like, "I'm into this so deep I can't get out. It has such a hold on me." That's the enemy at work.

Relentless and Customized

Like any good fisherman, the devil doesn't just use one kind of bait. I'm no fisherman — I just went down with my pole and my cheese and I was happy. But the guys who are real pros have a whole tackle box full of all sorts of different lures, and they will keep relentlessly fishing. If you aren't biting on spinning blue, they'll try floating reds. They go at this again and again and again. That's exactly what the enemy does.

These serious fishermen — I don't know how they do it — will go out for hours and hours. If they're not catching on one side of the lake, they'll move to the other side. That's exactly the enemy you have. Look at verse 14: "Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed." It's the lure. It's the temptation saying, "This is real. This will be so good. This will feel so good."

And let's be honest — sin is fun. If it's not fun, you aren't doing it right. But sin is fun only for a season. I've never been inside the mind of a fish, but I imagine when that fish sees the lure, there's excitement. He thinks he's on the end of something, that he's going to devour it — and it eats him alive. That's the way it is with sin. It's a wonderful illustration James provides us.

Natural Desires Gone Wild

The text says he is carried away and enticed by his own lust — his own personal, customized temptations. When we think of lust, we think primarily of sexual sin, but the Greek word refers to any deep, strong desire or longing of any kind. Some of these lusts — in fact, almost all of them — are nothing more than natural, good desires gone wild.

I've been reading a lot about health lately, and everything I read says you need to get enough sleep. Sleep is important. But you can get too much of it and become lazy. You need food, but too much of it and you're a glutton. Sex is good — and within the boundaries God put around it, it is genuinely good — but lust is when we take that natural desire and let it run wild.

Here's what I've noticed from years of doing this: when we talk about temptation and lust, we create in our minds these enormous, obvious sins and then say, "I'm okay. I haven't aborted a baby. I'm not having an affair. I haven't killed anybody." But it's much deeper and more subtle than that.

Provision Becomes Possession

Let me give you a great illustration of something good gone wild. First Timothy 5:8: "If anyone does not provide for his own, especially for those of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." It is important — and right — for you to provide for your family.

And I'm certainly not insensitive to the fact that sometimes things are tight, and there are seasons where demands at work preclude real involvement in things at church or in the kingdom for a while. That's designed to be a season. But it never ends. What begins as wanting to be a provider soon goes far beyond providing shelter, clothes, and food. It's not just a car — it's a new car. It's not just a vacation — it's an experience on the ocean. It's not just a primary residence, but it's so hot in the summer and we need to get away, and now it's a second home.

What started as provision has gone way beyond provision. What started as "for a season I'm going to have to devote myself to this" has extended into a lifetime. What I said was, "After a season I'll take up kingdom things again" — but that season never ended, and a good desire has quietly become something else entirely.

The Trap of Stuff and Debt

Ecclesiastes 5:10 says, "Whoever loves money never has enough money. Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied." It is easy to put the important things on hold, and before long, a whole spiritual sabbatical has consumed an entire life — wasted on stuff. There is nothing inherently wrong with stuff, but it can pull us into a spiral that leads straight into debt.

Proverbs 27:12 says, "A sensible man watches for problems ahead and prepares to meet them." Consider a simple illustration. A car is a necessity where we live. Most people have a car, and most people believe that car will eventually break down. Yet very few people, on a regular basis, set money aside for the next car. That means when the car breaks down, the plan is to borrow for the next one. The verse continues: "The simpleton never looks ahead and suffers the consequence." That is not a personal assessment — that is what the text says.

With that, debt enters the conversation. Here is a working definition: debt is an obligation to repay money we borrow to acquire possessions or experiences for which funds are not available but credit is. And it is not just possessions anymore — it is experiences too. What debt does is allow a person to pretend for a while to be something they are not, to acquire things they could never otherwise afford.

The Cost of Providing at the Wrong Level

Is it good to be a provider? Absolutely. But the question is: provide at what level, and what is it costing to provide at that level? The same story plays out over and over again. Young men and women start life thinking they need more, they get on a track for more, and they never get off it. At forty-five or fifty years old, they are saying, "I hate my job. I hate my life." They keep doing it because they have to have the money because they are providers.

And in reality, nobody cares. A person can bust themselves trying to give their kids the things they never had, while not giving their kids what those children actually want — which is them. That is a wasted life. At the end, if God is gracious and gives time for reflection, almost everyone says the same thing: all I really care about is my faith, my family, and my friends. If that is true, why not spend all these years pouring life into faith and family and friends?

The point is not to be anti-material or against stuff. The point is simply this: life is not found there. Possessions are a giant facade. They appear as though they will bring happiness, and they do not. There are people who have everything — people others aspire to be — who say, "I am miserable, and I do not know what to do." The answer is Jesus, but often their hearts have grown so hard they respond with, "No." That is what it looks like to waste a life: just pursue acceptable sins.

What We Are Teaching the Next Generation

Consider what is being communicated to young people. Talk to students at a university and ask why they are there. The answer, every single time, is: to get a job. Not one of them says they are there to learn anything. And parents have driven that message — "You need to get a job" — pointing their children toward the world and toward stuff, shaping their sense of value around it. In doing so, a whole series of consequences is set in motion that cannot easily be stopped.

When love is expressed not in time but in stuff, stuff becomes the currency of relationship. The question "How do I know you love me?" gets answered with, "Look at the stuff." And inside, the child is saying, "I do not care about the stuff. I want you."

Susan was in a small group with four or five young women. On the first night they simply went around the room and introduced themselves. She came home and said it was a meaningful evening, but she noticed something: all five of them said the exact same thing without realizing it. Every one of them said, "My dad was never there for me. He never loved me. He got us to the beach a lot. We went to Disneyland. We had the right clothes — but I never got a piece of him." That is the allure of stuff laid bare. It appeals to greed and pride, and it costs everything that actually matters.