Blue Jean Theology Part 5
Tom Shrader examines James 1:13-18, clarifying that while God tests believers to strengthen their faith and produce spiritual maturity, He never tempts them to sin. He explains how temptation works through external appeals to internal desires, ultimately leading to spiritual death if not resisted. The teaching emphasizes God's unchanging goodness and sovereignty as the source of every good gift.
“God does not test me and say, OK, now the testing's over. Now here's the hope, and it's really important. This looks kind of not very encouraging, until I understand that when I get to endurance, what happened is my faith is strengthened.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Blue Jean Theology (2011)
Recorded: 1996
Duration: 43 min
Themes: testing, temptation, trials, faith, maturity, endurance, goodness, sovereignty, facing hardship, struggling with doubt, new believer, spiritual immaturity, going through trials, questioning god's goodness, mentor, seeking growth
Scripture: James 1:2, James 1:13-18, James 4:6-7, Hebrews 5:12-14, 1 Corinthians 11, Genesis 3
Theological Themes: sanctification, spiritual growth, divine testing, theodicy, perseverance, spiritual maturity, god's nature, biblical authority
Full Transcript
We are today in our fifth week navigating our way through the book of James, and we really haven't made a lot of headway in terms of getting far into the book. We've only covered the first 12 verses, and it was not my intent originally, although now I understand it, to get this far. I thought we'd be further at this point.
It's become clear to me in the process of teaching. It's funny, you sit down—I don't know if some of you are teachers—you sit down, at least for me, I'm not really organized. Next week I'm not sure exactly where we'll be. I mean, I know where we'll be, but I don't know how far we go. A lot of times, even on Sunday, I'll get up and not know how far we're going to go.
So as I look at the book of James, I kind of just go chunk, chunk, chunk. My thought was we'd get through this in a couple of weeks, this first part. But the problem for me is I have bogged down in this idea of trials. I'm convinced the reason is right here, verse 2: "Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials."
The Reality of Trials in Every Life
If you are in this room today, we know this: you are either going into, coming out of, or are in the midst of trials. The trial is also a word that we would use simultaneously that would be test. In your life, there is a continual process of testing, and that testing is the testing of your faith.
Now, there's no way that you can count it joy in the midst of a trial. Here's the key word—this is always a key word—unless you know something. You see somebody that's in the midst of a hardship, and you see them rejoicing. It's not because they're deluded. It's because they know something you don't know.
Here's what they know: they know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and endurance produces maturity.
The Problem of Spiritual Immaturity
There's an interesting section in the book of Hebrews as the author of Hebrews is writing to this group of people, and he's very much chastising them, criticizing them. Here's what he says: "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God. You've come to need milk, not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he's a babe."
Here's what he's saying: you've been at this a while, and here's the problem—by now, you should be further along. Let me just put a parenthesis in here. Some of you have been coming to this study for years. We are grateful for that, and I would never say to somebody, you don't need to be coming here. But how many times do you need this over and over and over and over and over again?
See, there's a problem here. You're going through it and going through it and going through it and going through it. Here's the problem. Here's what the author says: "Verse 14, the solid food is for the mature. Who are the mature? Who, because of practice, have their senses trained to discern good and evil."
Here's what makes a person mature: there's been practice.
God's Purpose in Testing
Now, God is going to take you, and He's going to put you in this process of trials and tests, and He's going to do it for a reason. His reason is very clear. It's not to destroy you. It's not because He's angry with you. It's not to get you back. It's not to zap you.
He's going to put you in the midst of these trials and the midst of these tests for one reason, so that your faith will be strengthened and you will be mature. Now, this is really important: you may fail a test, but you will never flunk the course. You may fail a test here. You may fail a test there.
He's not going to bypass you. He's going to come in and give you that test again, maybe in a different form, maybe the same test. He's going to test you here and test you there, but you're never going to flunk the course, because He's going to work on you until you become and start to grow mature.
The Availability of Wisdom
In the midst of tests, He says this to you: "If anyone lacks wisdom, all they have to do is ask." Here's what I've discovered over the years. Lots of people want to get together and want to talk to me about problems they have. Here's the problem with my kid. Here's the problem with my spouse. Here's the problem with my job. Here's the problem with whatever.
Here's what I've discovered: it's pretty easy most of the time to figure out what they need to do. It isn't that tough. You don't need to be Ann Landers or Jim Dobson to figure out what most people need to do. All you've got to do is kind of listen to it. In fact, I've gotten to the point where I'll listen to it most of the time and say, "What do you think you ought to do?" And almost always they'll self-diagnose this, because most of the time you really know.
Here's the problem: when I'm in the midst of this and it's me, a lot of times I'm so emotionally involved that I can't disconnect, so I end up doing a bunch of really stupid things.
When Emotions Override Wisdom
I'll give you some areas. People dealing with their kids—that happens a lot. If that were my kid, here's what I'd do. Then all of a sudden it's your kid and you go, "Well, I better not do that."
I see it a lot whenever you—for me, I was an awful dater. Not only was I a lousy date, I didn't even enjoy the process of it, because male-female stuff, by and large, is all screwed up. All the emotions are going and all the stuff is going, and you get these brilliant people who can run corporations, but they can't function on this level. They're like teenagers again when a male-female relationship kicks in. It's weird. Something just goes, boom!
We had this discussion two weeks ago at the noon study. I was talking to a lady who—a mutual friend is dating a guy who's in the process of leaving his fifth wife to date, to go with her. Now, if you don't know anything else, but you couldn't tell her that, because in the midst of this, we get goofy. I mean, we just think, "I'm different" or whatever. Well, in the midst of
a test or a trial or a male-female relationship, you need wisdom. What should I do? Not, what do I need to know? Not just the facts, ma'am. What should I do?
In the midst of these trials, ask. He says, that's all you've got to do, is ask me for wisdom and I'll give it to you. But let him ask in faith, without doubt. For the one who doubts is like the surf. He's blowing over here, then he's blowing over there. That person shouldn't expect to get anything from the Lord, for he is double-minded.
Asking in Faith vs. Double-Mindedness
Now, here's what He's saying. When I come to God, I ask in faith. The faith is not that God will do something. The faith is believing that God is who He said He was, that Jesus is who He said He was, that He'll do what He said He promised to do.
We had a guy in one of the studies who we met one day, and we're talking, and we're working through this problem with his wife. We decide, here's what you need to do, and do this, do that, all that stuff. I see him a couple weeks later, and I said, how's it going with your wife? And he said, I filed for divorce. I said, well, that wasn't what we talked about. He said, well, something just wasn't right. So when I left you, I went over to the palm reader on Central Avenue.
That is a double-minded man. He's got God's stuff, and then palm readers, and then God's stuff, and then tarot cards, and then God's stuff, and then fortune tellers. Now, every time I tell that, I get the same reaction. Oh, man, what an idiot. And then some of you are going, well, what's the name of that palm reader? I mean, how do I get his number?
The Vulnerability of Hurt
When you're hurting like that, you're vulnerable. I mean, don't you wonder how some of these people get sucked into some of this stuff? That comes from somebody who's never been truly hurt like that. When you're hurting, you're vulnerable.
How do these guys know? Let me tell you something. Especially with a woman, and this is not meant to be sexist at all. This guy can see where a woman is. He can talk to her for about 30 seconds, and he can work her like a cheap suit in about five minutes. How could he ever do that to you? You're the only one in the world. I'm shocked. All of a sudden, we're manipulating and we're playing, and now you've got some woman who's just signed over all her stuff to this guy she's known. We might call him even a gigolo, to a guy that she's known for 30 days.
How does that happen? It happens because I'm hurting and I'm vulnerable. That's how it happens. And you need to understand that. In the midst of those, I need wisdom.
The Circular Nature of Growth
So here's what we used last week. We said, unfortunately, this is linear in nature, and it should be circular. Trials plus faith equals endurance. So there's a process at which I go through this, and then I go through it again and again and again and again. God does not test me and say, OK, now the testing's over.
Now here's the hope, and it's really important. This looks kind of not very encouraging, until I understand that when I get to endurance, what happened is my faith is strengthened, and my faith is that that gives substance to my hope, and now my future is secure, and now I'm hopeful, and now in the midst of this circumstance, I can understand how God's going to work. So you've got whatever it is, and you begin to pray in the midst of this test, and you say, God give me wisdom, God give me help, and God begins to move.
He may not necessarily take away the circumstance. He may leave you in the circumstance, but He won't leave you in the circumstance alone. He will put you there, and join you there, and encourage you there. And He's not doing it for any reason other than you.
God Tests for Our Sake, Not His
We looked last week at Moses. Moses goes through all of this stuff. He thinks he's hot stuff. God's man, ready to do God's work, and he's ready to do God's work, but he wants to do it Moses' way. God puts him in the desert for 40 years, to the point that when God comes to him and says, you're the man, this man who the Bible said was powerful and learned indeed, then when He comes to him, Moses says, I was never eloquent. All I've ever done was stutter. Well, let me help you out here. And then they go, you know the story. They go, take the two and a half million Jews, and boom, away they go.
Moses didn't go through that test for God's sake. God knew how that was going to turn out. When God said to Abraham, take Isaac and take him up to the mount, and I want you to sacrifice him, I want you to kill him, and he's got the knife, and he's got it raised, and he's ready to plunge it into his son, God's not putting Abraham through that for God's sake. He's doing it for Abraham's sake.
When He takes Joseph and He puts him into the prison, not just the prison, the bowels of the prison, and then one day he goes from prisoner to prime minister, God doesn't do that for God's sake. God knows how it's going to turn out. He does it for Joseph's sake.
The Purpose of Testing
In your life, God puts you through tests. He does it for one reason, for your sake, so that, here's the whole key, so that you will understand the depth of what it means to believe God.
The illustration we've used, and I think it's a great one, you and I can study and study and study and study and study, just like we would a biology book. But there's two parts to a biology class. There's the classroom and the laboratory. We can study and study and study in this stuff, but it's all classroom until we go into the real world and start getting kicked around. Now the trials come and the test comes. Even the temptations begin to come, but these trials and these tests are there so that our faith is stronger.
So when we come out at the other end, it's exactly what Job went through. Job's in there, and he's got all these people. His
friends are saying, "Job, what'd you do? What'd you do, Job? You must have done something."
Well, I say Job, and all the Scottsdale Bible people flinch. They're still having reactions from that. Not again, no. Still having flashbacks.
So Job goes through all of this stuff. I can do it in five minutes. Job goes through it and make the same point. Job goes through all of this stuff, and it's coming, and his friends say, "Job, what are you doing?" And his wife says, "Job, curse God and die." They go through this whole process. At the end, when it's all over, Job says, "I had heard about you, but now I've seen you. I had heard about all this stuff, and I heard about how great you were, and I heard about how smart you were, and I heard about how much grace you had, and I heard about how much mercy you'd show, and I heard about how faithful you were, but now I've seen it."
That's the reason you and I encounter various tests, various trials.
The Question About Temptation
Now, in the midst of this, there's a question that pops up. I can tell you again, maybe it's just me, but yesterday, again, people looked lost as I kicked into this portion of it. There's a question that pops up naturally, and James doesn't mess around. He introduces himself, tells us who he's writing to, and then He gets into trials, and now He's talking about all this stuff, but He says, "Listen, understand that God is faithful, and you'll endure to the end."
But then He anticipates, "Wait a minute. When we talk about trials and tests, we talk about difficult things. We talk about bad things. Let me ask you this, James. When I'm tempted to sin, is that God testing me?"
See, it becomes a very important question here, and it's as though James anticipates that question, because here's what He said: "Let no one say when he's tempted, 'I'm being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone."
Three Key Points
We have three points today. That's the first point: God does not tempt and cannot be tempted.
Here's the second point: That tempting is an internal, external process. "But each one is tempted when he's carried away and enticed by his own lust." It's inside, outside, and then He says, here's what I mean by that. "Then when lust is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death." There's a distinction here between temptation and sin, but once I move from temptation to sin, I'm moving to death. "Don't be kidding yourself about this one," He says in verse 16. That's the second point.
Here's the third point: God is eternal and He's sovereign. "For every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of light, with whom there's no variation or shifting shadow." God is immutable. He's eternal. He's sovereign. He's good. "In the exercise of His will, He brought us forth by the word of truth." What's He talking about? He's talking about believers here. He's talking about God caused us to be born again. God brought us forth by His will so that we might be said as it were firstfruits among His creatures.
So those are the three points for this morning.
God Does Not Tempt
Here's the first one: When you're tempted, you cannot say, "God's the one who's tempting me." Now that may sound harsh to you, but that's a denial of human nature.
You go all the way back to the book of Genesis, and there you are. You're in the garden. It's the introduction of sin into the human race. We already have had, although not recorded, we already have Lucifer and all that stuff going on. But now we got Adam and we got Eve.
And now what's happened - you know the story. God came to Adam and said, "Don't eat." Adam apparently conveys this message to Eve. They're there. Eve is sitting there. The serpent comes and tempts Eve. And Eve takes the fruit. She eats of it. She says to Adam, "I want you to eat of it." And he eats of it. And Paul tells us in the New Testament, "Adam sinned, Eve was deceived."
The First Blame Game
God comes to Adam and He says to him, after this has happened, "Who told you you were naked?" See, to this point they've been naked and nobody understood it. But if they're naked, no big deal. "Who told you you were naked?" In other words, "How in the world did you end up sinning?"
Do you remember what Adam said? What did he say? Yeah, exactly. The woman. Here's how I sinned: the woman. But the operative phrase is the next phrase: "The woman that you gave me." In other words, "God, I sinned and it's your fault. I would have never sinned if you wouldn't have created this woman. You created her. You're the one that said it wasn't good for me to be alone. You're the one that said I shouldn't be here by myself. You said I needed a helpmate. So you created this woman, and along she comes with this fruit, and I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. I would have never eaten it. Never even thought about it. And it's all because of the woman. And God, it's your fault that I ate."
And then God goes to Eve. He's done with that. He goes to Eve and He said, "And your deal?" And she said, "What? The serpent." And the implication is the same: the serpent that you created. "Who are you, God? Why would you let this serpent loose? Now this serpent is slithering around, tempting people and all over the place."
Our Natural Tendency to Blame
We have this natural tendency. We've been seeing ourselves as victims long before there was Ricki Lake. We're a victim. We're a victim of something. There's no way - I mean, I just can't get face to face with my sin.
The very first people and the very first sin, they said, even then, you're looking around for excuses. And they couldn't say, "Well, my social economic background." Can't do that. The environment? Perfect. Can't do that. "Ah, the woman you made." See? I don't want to say it's me.
We need to understand something about God: God cannot be tempted. By the way, put a little parenthesis there because we're going to come back and deal with that. But God doesn't tempt. That's the point He's making. So into your life comes these...
How Temptation Really Works
Temptations—where do they come from? Well, they don't come from God. Now, this doesn't say anything about Satan. That's implied. The temptations come when Satan entices us with something internal to begin to bait something that's there. Satan comes with something external to bait something that's internal.
Now, don't answer these questions because it will only frustrate us. These are just rhetorical questions. What happens when I'm tempted is I'm carried away or enticed. Some translations will say baited by my own lust. God cannot be tempted because He can't be baited by anything that's internal. God is only holy and He's only just and He's only merciful and He's only these things.
So I ask you this question. Don't answer the question. Just think about this. By the way, this is one of those things that you need to plow away, spit it up every once in a while, play with it a little more because it gets you thinking about some really good things.
Could Jesus Have Sinned?
Could Jesus have sinned? Was it possible for the Lord Jesus Christ to sin? And the answer to that question is absolutely not. Could He be tempted? Sure. Why would Satan tempt Him if he knew He couldn't sin? Because Satan's Satan and he's not God.
But temptation is when something internal is enticed by something external. There was nothing internal in Christ that would draw Him to sin. In fact, it's the opposite. He's repulsed by sin. He hates sin. When He becomes sin or tastes sin, it's on the cross. It's your sin and mine as Christians. Our sin thrust on Him at that moment and He says, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" That's the agony of the cross.
Talk about the agony of the cross. You don't talk about the whipping and the nailing and the pounding and the scourging. We talk about God's transfer of our sin to Christ. That is the agony of the cross.
Is Temptation Sin?
So here's what happens. Here's how sin takes place. One more question. Is temptation sin? No. If temptation was sin, then Jesus would have sinned. Was Jesus tempted? Sure. He was tempted in the sense that all the external was thrown at Him, but there was nothing internal there.
If you can hang on to the end, a lot of this is going to come together. How does this temptation thing take place? External appeals to internal.
Guarding Against Temptation
There are certain things where you don't put yourself, for example. I think you need to be very careful in what you watch and what you listen to, what movies you go to. I'm not saying don't go to movies, but I'm saying I think it's really stupid to go and put yourself in an environment—television, any of these other things—put yourself in an environment where garbage is going to come in because it's going to come in and you're never going to get it out of there. Especially guys. I assume women are like this. I'm not as sure, but I know guys are like this, especially in the sex stuff. It's just there.
I had a friend who's particularly vulnerable in this area of pornography. It's Christmas Day. Let me give it to you again. Christmas Day. His grandkids are over. Christmas Day with grandkids. He gives them a present, but the present needs batteries. He goes to Circle K, and the guy's busy, and he said, "The batteries are around over here." He goes back, and the batteries are here, and the Penthouse and the Playboy and all this stuff are there.
It's Christmas Day on a mission of mercy to get batteries. He's not looking to be tempted, and all of a sudden he finds himself reaching for that and looking through this. He said it took months and months and months to get those pictures out of his mind. That's the way it is.
When Temptation Strikes
But I can't stop the temptation. I've got a zillion illustrations. There's one. I used to teach up at the Crescent, and I'm driving along one day on the freeway, and I've got Sandy Patty on, and we're singing "How Great Thou Art" or something. She's off a little bit, but I'm hitting every one of these. I'm nailing these notes. I'm there. It's not a pretty thing, but I'm singing away, and we're singing away, and we come around, and there used to be this billboard down on the freeway that was for Virginia Slims that said "We've come a long way, baby."
And the thing was bigger than Dallas with a girl who had legs that were 4,000 miles long. And as you come around, there are those legs. I'm on my way to teach a Bible study. I'm singing "How Great Thou Art," and all of a sudden there are those legs. And I've got to consciously stop and say, "Okay, God, I saw those. I want to see them again, but I'm not going to look. But get that out of my mind."
So I can stop temptation there. Temptation doesn't lead to sin. It leads to sin, I think, when I begin to dwell on that.
How Satan Works
So how's that come? Well, along comes Satan, and he begins to throw this stuff in front of us. I was, years ago, invited up to a dude ranch. And being the dude that I am, away that I went. But it was my kind of a dude ranch. It was just opening, and it was by a guy out of Dallas who had just billions of dollars. And he had one of the Hunt daughters had done all the interiors, and they were Hunter Green. And we had a chef who cooked, and then we had a dessert specialist from New York who made all this stuff.
So we'd go down for dessert, and then we'd come back, and our bed would be turned down, and there would be chocolates on our pillows. If I'm going to dude it, that was the way I wanted to dude it.
So it's about the second night, and I'm up early. And I go down to get coffee, and there's this guy there. And I said, "What's your deal?" And he's standing in front of this cabinet with all these little drawers in it. And I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fisher boy." And I said, "What's that mean?" He said, "Well, what I do is a lot of people come here, and they want to play like they're fisher people, but they're not really fishermen. So what I do is I go and fish the stream first thing in the morning."
I take all of these different flies, and I find out what the fish are hitting on. So I'll come back, and I'll say, "Okay, here's what you need to do. If you're going to go around the bend where it's shady, you need to use these kind of yellowy-green flies. If you're going to stay out here where it's sunshiny, you need to go with red." And he said, "Do you fish?" I said, "Nope, but I just got a great illustration for how Satan works."
That's how Satan works. He's the perfect fisher boy. He'll just rig up a little fly, and he'll just cast it out there for you. And he'll let that thing hit. And you'll just kind of circle around and not bite necessarily, and kind of spit that thing out. No problem. He just reels it in, because he's got a whole chest of these drawers. And he just keeps pulling them out until finally you go, "Ow!" That's the perfect illustration. Something internal is enticed by something external.
The Antidote to Temptation
Now, there's an antidote to this. James gives us the antidote. The antidote is found later in the book in James 4, verse 6 and 7. Let me read it to you. James 4, verse 7: "Submit, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."
So in the middle of this temptation, here's what I don't do. I don't say, "Well, you know what? I've been a Christian for a while, and I've got the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and I'm going to fight this thing." I can't tell you how many people have said to me—they don't say it anymore, but they used to—they said, "You know, with your background and drinking and all that kind of stuff, you'd have a great ministry in the bars and stuff." I said, "Well, I'm afraid I'd get a lot more of them on me than me on them. I don't think that's such a great idea."
I'm not about, nor should you think you're smart enough to outfox Satan. You're going to suck it up and go on your own. "I can do it. I'll just suck it up, and I'm just going to determine and double my efforts. I know I haven't been faithful, but I'm going to double my efforts." No. Here's what I do. I draw near to God.
Drawing Near to God
How do I do that? I begin to study His Word. I begin to see what He has to say. I begin to understand that He says this temptation over here, if it becomes sin, is going to rip my guts out and kill me. I begin to understand His Word. I begin to understand who He is. I begin to understand how He works.
We have a great confusion. Steve Forbes is running an ad this morning that says—and this is not, very honestly, I can't believe I'm going to say this, I'm undecided—but he's running an ad this morning, and it's a fine ad, except in the middle of it, he says, "I'm convinced," and now, you know, he's been negative, so now he's going to be positive. So he's doing all this positive stuff and smiling his way through the ad, and he's saying, in the middle of this, "I'm convinced, we're on the verge of a huge economic growth." And then he adds this phrase: "spiritual revival or renewal."
Let me help you out, in my mind. We are seeing spiritual renewal. Here's the way I would say it. Satan is alive and well. You've got this giant move spiritually, but the vast majority of it is false religion.
Our Confusion About God
We are very confused about God. I think I read to you the other day the prayer from the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast a couple of weeks ago, where we prayed to Buddha and Brahma and Shufni and all these other things, everything in the world but Jesus. We're very confused about God, and I think this is the reason why. Three things.
Number one, people are kind of following their own hunches. When you talk to somebody, and learn to ask questions, in the midst of these great theological debates, don't be trying to throw up everything you've ever heard. Ask a couple of questions. The one who talks least tends to win in these discussions.
So ask them, like, "How did you get that?" And you will hear things like, "Well, Ann Landers says," "There was a guy on Oprah," "Paul Harvey not long ago," "I think I read in the Bible," "You know, I was reading this men are from Venus, women are from Mars thing, and here's what," "Somebody was really good the other day on Larry King Live, and here's what she said." And you say to them, "Well, do you know that that's true?" And they'll say, "No, I think it's true."
The Question of Truth
And what they're saying, and I don't mean to take this into some metaphysical area, but this is where we need to go. When they say, "I think it's true," you've got to say, "But is it true? Can I know truth?" Einstein made an interesting observation. He said, no one can deny—I'm paraphrasing here—no one can deny the existence of a cosmic force, God. But then he added a second part to the sentence: "But no one could ever know Him."
See, the Christian faith comes along and says, here's Christ, and if you know Him, you know God. And until you know Christ, you'll never know God. So now I'm sitting here, and I've got Confucianism and Islam and Buddhism and Orthodox Jewishness, and I've got all these other faiths all lined up. Here you go. They can all be wrong, or one can be right, but they can't all be right.
You can't have one faith that says we're all gods, another one that says Jesus was a rabbi, and another one that says Jesus was God, come in the flesh to die for. They can't all be right. They can all be wrong, in theory, but they can't all be right. When people talk to you about spiritual things, most of it is some kind of fortune cookie, semi-Christian milling of Eastern mysticism all tied together.
The Problem of Religious Pluralism
Here's the second thing. Most people think all of these beliefs are equally true. We live in a pluralistic society, which means you're free to worship Buddha, you're free to worship Muhammad, you're free to worship here. All of these have protection under the law and should. But that does not mean all are right. We have to recapture the idea of one true God.
So, when I'm that deeply sincere Buddhist, who's living this life that may be filled with fasting and hardship and sleeping
on a floor and all this other stuff, why that person may be very sincere, that person, if they die with that belief, spends eternity in hell. Because what they believe is wrong. We've got to grab that. We've got to grab that again.
2 plus 2 is 4. I feel like it's 5. It doesn't matter, it's 4. But on all my heart, I'm telling you, from my experience, 2 plus 2 seems to be 5. No, but it's 4. But I want it to be 5. But it's 4. I think I'm wrong. Who are you to tell me you're wrong? Because 2 plus 2 is 4. Because it's true. That's why at the end of his life, Francis Schaeffer coined the phrase, let's speak of true truth.
The Problem of Self-Deception
Here's the third thing. Most people don't want to deal with their own sinfulness. I was just yesterday, a friend of mine was sharing his testimony at my daughter's school. She had arranged for him to come in. So I went to listen to him. He was making a point.
He had been involved in holding up grocery stores and beating up people and knifing people, and he did a lot of really awful things. The first weekend that he decided to, in fact, it was the first weekend, he'd been out of jail a while, but decided he needed money, he robbed 12 hotels between San Jose and San Francisco. But he said, you know what, when I got to jail, he turned around and said, I'm glad I'm not that child molester. Boy, there's real sin over there.
We have a great capacity to somehow diffuse from us this idea of sin. We are very confused about God, primarily because we won't read His Word and understand that it's true. I'm amazed at how many people I spend time with who are involved in Bible study and lots of other things, who read this Word and even then will read it and say, but I don't think my God would do that.
Let's just get it down. Let's get it to the bottom line. You're worshiping a false God, because that is what God did. We understand this again.
The Nature and Consequences of Temptation
Here's the second point. Temptation: something external entices something internal, and the result is death. Death means literally separation. So if I am a non-Christian, if I'm somebody who rejects this, the death that I experience is not only physical death. Both Christian and non-Christian will die physically. What happens for me is that at death, I'm separated from God.
I haven't been sleeping very well. Now, the minute I say that, every one of you want to come up with some vitamins or something. I've got all the vitamins I need. Thank you very much. I'm on an hour, off an hour, on an hour, and I wake up the other night, and I'm tossing. Susan says, I'm out of here. I'm going down to the guest room. I can't handle this. So I said, turn on the TV on the way out, will you? And that's for our own good.
So she's down there, and I'm laying there, and I doze off. I wake up, and I see that McLean Stevenson has just died. I don't know McLean Stevenson from anything. McLean Stevenson may be a giant of the Christian faith. It's not been my experience, but I don't know that. All of a sudden, I found my mind saying, how many people, because it dawned on me that probably McLean Stevenson is in hell. I don't know that, but I'm playing that scenario out. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Not judging McLean Stevenson.
The Eternal Stakes
All of a sudden, I found myself saying, how many people do I know that if they died tomorrow morning, would spend eternity in hell? See, that's the stakes. These guys are going to sit down there at Gammage tonight and want to know, where's Bob? What about Bob? And then they're going to go through all that process. Then they're going to beat each other up. Then they're going to tell you, this is deeply serious. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't know.
I'll tell you what, what we're talking about now is infinitely more important than who gets elected president. Where are you going to spend eternity? Even if you elect the wrong guy, and he screws the whole thing up, and everything goes south for us, that at least fades away at some point. This never does.
So if you're a non-Christian, and you die in that state, you spend eternity in hell. On the other side of the coin, if you're a Christian, sin still brings forth death, meaning separation from God in this sense. As a Christian, the Scripture teaches clearly, if I'm a Christian today, I will always be a Christian. I will always be in His family. My union with Christ is inseparable. But the communion that I have with Him can be hampered by my sin.
So now you have people saying, God doesn't seem as close to me as He used to be. That's not because God has moved, that's because you have moved. That's because your sin is beginning to cloud that. And Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 11, you can sin to such a point where God says, you've become an embarrassment to me, even as my own kid, and I'm going to take you home. So I need to understand that.
God's Unchanging Goodness
Here's the last thing. God is good, and God is sovereign. Every good thing bestowed, that word means literally, continually being poured out from heaven. Every good thing bestowed, every perfect gift is from God, who is immutable. He does not change. He does not shift. That is God, and that's the way He is.
So when you're in this, here's tying it all together. You're coming into the midst of these tests. You're coming into the midst of these trials. And in your life, there's these temptations. Understand this. All that is good is from God. The rest is not.
The Mystery of Good and Bad Circumstances
Now let me try to close this and have it make some sense to you. I believe that most of the time, we can't even understand what good things are and what bad things are. I'm not speaking on a moral basis. Stealing is wrong. Murder is wrong. We got all that figured out. I'm saying along comes some circumstance into your life.
Let me give you an example. Here's a young man, and he gets cancer, and he loses his arm. He has to sever his arm, which ends a career. Is that good? Is that bad? I look at this, and I say, this is awful. But
All of a sudden, I understand this is Dave Dravecki. Let's say that Dave Dravecki is sitting there one night, and he says, "God, here's what I want more than anything else. I want to be used by you. I want you to use me in a mighty and a powerful way." God says, "Perfect. I need that arm." Boom. So in that sense, that cancer becomes the answer to his prayer.
I can't tell when these things come into my life whether they're good or whether they're bad oftentimes. The tests and the temptations are often going hand in hand. You're going to go goofy trying to figure all this stuff out.
The Spirit Leads Jesus to Temptation
Here's my punchline: you're going to go goofy trying to figure all this stuff out. Jesus goes to the desert to be tempted. Who tempts Jesus in the desert? It's not a trick question. How did Jesus get to the desert? The Spirit of God led Him. The Spirit of God is the one who led Him out there to put Him into this situation where He would be tempted.
Tests Versus Temptations
Here's the distinction. In my life come trials. Those trials are different than the temptations in this way. The trials are to confirm or to prove my faith. The temptations are to destroy me.
God tests me so that I'll have endurance and maturity and I'll grow. Satan tempts me to bring death and destruction and alienate me from God and make me useless to my Lord. That's the distinction.
What Comes Next in James
Now, having dealt with the tests and the trials, James says, "Okay, how should we live?" And now he begins to talk about what is religion. Then he has the longest contiguous section in the Bible on the most deadly weapon we have. He talks about the tongue. Now he begins a very practical way of describing to us how we're to live. Next week we take a look at that.
Father, thank You for Your Word, that it's true and it's real and it can be believed. We pray that You would take some of these on the surface, not particularly light and cheery topics, that You would give us a sense of understanding of who You are, that that would result in us understanding who we are. And, Father, that as those things work themselves through in our life, that as tests and trials and temptations and difficulties come to us, that You would use them in a powerful way to teach us the truth.
God, thank You that You love us enough to test us. God, we ask that You would continue to do whatever You need to do to make us men and women who truly love You. Father, we thank You for this and we thank You in Jesus' name. Amen.