What does God really expect of you?
Cry out to Him the moment you sense temptation coming at you. Of course, you first have to invest time and energy understanding what temptation is, and that requires you understand what sin is. We don’t have a culture that teaches this properly. Our Anglo-American mythology says that a sting operation is generally unfair, where the government offers temptations to do things the government says is evil. And those government sting operators seem to have zero morals, don’t they? They’ll do anything to sucker you into it.
Yet that is a broken image of how God operates with His own people.
First off, our “government” from Heaven is much more personal and loving than any human government. Our Father genuinely adores us, and wants us to escape evil. His Law isn’t “law” like a human government, especially an impersonal and inhumane Western government. His Law is the fabric of Creation, the very nature of how things work. Unlike lazy and venal government agents, Creation itself is the good cop that never fails to act consistently with God’s Word. No temptation is ever stronger than the Creator’s revelation.
Our God isn’t out to take away all the fun, but to teach us that not all fun is fun. Some fun offered to us is destructive. Once we understand it as destructive, we have an edge on escaping temptation. We have to understand that some of our strongest human urges are deadly if not kept inside certain boundaries. Our own fleshly nature tells us that this or that temptation is harmless. We are taught to ignore that Creation is alive and watching our every move. By building a vision of the natural world as inert and impersonal, we are blinded to how reality works.
Maybe you remember that song by Bruce Springsteen, “Hungry Heart”? It’s evil. It excuses moral depravity and blames the heart, but it’s actually just fleshly sentiment. Your fleshly nature is not you. It is an enemy you are forced to endure in this life, chained to your side as long as you breathe oxygen. Your heart is a much higher element in your soul, beckoning you to higher things.
You can’t even say your fleshly nature is your body. While your body is a component of the natural world, it’s your fleshly nature that reminds you what happened in the Garden of Eden. We forfeited our mission of guiding the natural world, so it now acts largely unmanaged. So does our body, but while the natural world is not fallen, our fleshly nature is. It is the enemy of all the God proclaimed. So when our body does what’s natural, calling out with unguided appetites, our fleshly nature is standing by to always suggest what makes the most sense to it and its sinful desire: Lust of the Eyes, Lust of the Flesh and Boastful Pride. It’s the fleshly nature of fallen mankind that makes such a mess of the natural world and our lives.
Natural bodily appetites are what they are, and they can always be fulfilled through proper moral restraint, but our flesh is there making outrageous demands out of simple appetites. You cannot ditch the flesh, and you can’t really kill it without ending this life, but you can consistently let the heart rule and put the fleshly nature in its place — nailed to the Cross.
Your conscious awareness can grovel in the flesh, maybe pretend to be reasonable, but always placating base desires in one way or another. Or you can strive to draw your conscious awareness up into the heart and keep sounding out your convictions. The power to overcome starts with awakening your conscious mind to the heart. It means learning how to actually give a darn what God thinks. It means recognizing that every decision you make is for or against Him personally.
It means ditching the false perception of objective reality, as if God is also subject to its boundaries. The universe is not inert; it lives and breathes with the purpose of Almighty God.
