What Are the World's Tactics? (16)

16 For all that is in the world -- the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life -- is not from the Father but is from the world.

Remember your castle. You want Jesus seated firmly on its throne. But the devil tries to appeal to your sinful desires with the world system he controls. He hopes you'll surrender to one of his tactics. And, though he carries out these tactics in billions of ways, he only has three temptations he uses over and over again. Let's look at each of them, in order, while thinking about how they particularly affect us, and how we can overcome each.

Desires of the Flesh

First, John mentions the desires of the flesh. Many of you have Bible translations that call it the lust of the flesh, which is accurate. The New Living Translation calls it the craving for physical pleasure, which also conveys the idea well. The desires of the flesh are those things that our body wants to engage in. Our bodies, though redeemed by Christ, have not yet been glorified. One day, in a moment, we will all be changed, and our mortal bodies will put on immortality, but this event has not yet occurred. Therefore, we still experience strong desires to fulfill the urges of the body in a twisted or sinful way.

God, of course, made the body with the capacity to feel. It is part of His goodness and creation. But, through the fall of mankind, we now love to use those bodies to feel things beyond the bounds He has designed for us. So we take natural desires like a sex drive or hunger and turn them into immorality or gluttony. And this particular line of temptation appeals to that part of us. It longs to get us to engage or experience something outside God's will for our lives.

Think of the desires of the flesh as the temptation to feel. And, as we pass through life, men want to feel things.

We want the feelings attached to substances. We turn to marijuana or harder drugs for a high, a nearly out-of-body experience. Or we might overeat as a way to get a different kind of distracting feeling. Some will turn to drunkenness to numb the pains of life, to feel differently for a little while.

We also want the feelings attached to passive consumption. Isn't this the case after a long day at work? In their proper place, things like television, social media, or video games can be a healthy distraction, but men often become consumed with the feelings of escape these outlets provide.

And it would be wrong for me not to mention men want the feelings attached to sexual experiences.

• Many will turn to the digital world in an attempt to satisfy sexual urges. The ease of screens often replaces the honest hard work of pursuing married sexual love. Single and married men alike will consider the cost of married sexual intimacy too high. It does, after all, require commitment, transparency, and openness, and many men are ill-equipped to give themselves to another in this way. All they really want is an orgasm, so they turn to the ease of the screen.

• And many will give in to an emotional attachment, for it isn't only women who enter affairs of the heart. Men, too, find that level of affirmation intoxicating.

• And many will turn to the actual act of infidelity or immorality, believing it will bring them satisfaction.

Men, the temptation to feel is strong. God made this good world for us to experience. And there is a way, in Christ, to appropriately engage with our desires. But discouragement or depression or distraction will come, and in those moments, we must not give in to the desire to feel. None of us is immune. Life is hard, and the temptation to feel the desires of the flesh cry out to us, asking us to take a break from our struggles, perhaps even telling us we deserve to do so.

Antidote #1: Integrity

This is why we need the antidote of integrity. Think of the word integer when you think of integrity. An integer is a whole number, not a fraction of a number, and a person with integrity is a whole person, not fractioned off and divided. Someone with integrity is not perfect, but what you see is what you get.

A person with integrity has not succumbed to hypocrisy. They know they should not claim to be one thing when actually another. They strive for congruency. I'm sure you've all been disappointed to learn of a Christian, maybe someone you knew personally, who turned out to carry major secret sin. Somewhere along the way, they lost their integrity.

You see, with integrity, we refuse to believe the lie that we can take on a little water without sinking. They call that the Titanic myth, where we compartmentalize our lives, thinking one compartment can flood, yet the boat will still float. This person says: This is my church segment. Here is my friend segment. Here is my work segment. Here is a segment of sin.

No! The man or woman with the love of the Father in them, with the light of God shining upon them, wants every segment to have consistency and wholeness.

Be on guard! Refuse segmentation!

Are you on guard? Are there areas of your life you keep tucked away and hidden? Is there an unhealthy attitude or practice which is beginning to take root in you? As quickly as you can, get it in the light.

"Confess you sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed." (James 5:16)

Have you ever seen a field of grass completely overrun with weeds? It didn't happen overnight. I want you to think of this whenever you drive by Mt. Toro. You can see it from the church. Just below Mt. Toro is Black Mountain. The reason for its dark appearance is the manzanita bush, which you can also find in Fort Ord. It's a coastal shrub that worked its way from the ocean all the way up the mountain. Slowly, it consumed everything else in its path. And now you have a black mountain.

Let this be an illustration of the way a lack of integrity works. One little desire of the flesh gets in, and soon your entire person is consumed. Instead, we must carefully work to keep ourselves free of this weed.

Think on this truth:

Proverbs 4:23 (ESV) — Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

I heard theologian Wayne Grudem, a very kind and humble Christian man, talk about this once. He told of a time he was involved in the creation of the Bible translation I'm teaching from. A group of scholars, brilliant people of various backgrounds and disciplines, dedicated months at a time to word-by-word translation of the various Old and New Testament manuscripts. They all stayed in a hotel where they'd daily gather for seven or eight hours of translation work together. All-day long, they thought hard about God's word.

Well, during that time, he grew tired, so he began neglecting his morning reading of Scripture, which he justified with the knowledge he'd be translating the Bible all day long. Soon, he found himself short with his wife, a bit of a grump. She asked what was bothering him. It didn't take long for him to recognize the problem; he'd neglected his walk with God. He realized he hadn't kept his heart with all vigilance. His spring was corrupted. He repented and got back into God's word for himself. That's integrity.

Let's have vigilance. Let's protect our hearts from the temptation to feel.