June 6
“Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul.” (1 Peter 2:11)
As we discussed yesterday, refusing temptation immediately, decisively, and persistently involves first clearly recognizing the sin that you are being tempted to commit and second hating that sin and harboring a revulsion to it. These are key, foundational steps to rejecting temptation and turning away from it. Our immediate refusal of the temptation needs to be a habit and needs to be so ingrained that we don’t really stop and think about it, we just do it, and we just refuse the temptation without giving it another thought.
How do we develop this habit and reflex of refusing temptation? Prayer is key. Pray that God would give you this clarity, this hatred for your sin, this reflex to immediately refuse it. The more earnestly and continually we pray for this, the more God will do it in our lives. This we can be certain is God’s will for us, that God would give us clarity and hatred regarding our sin and an immediate reflex of rejecting it without having to think about it and struggle with it whenever it tempts us, so we can pray this prayer with confidence that He hears and He will answer us (1 John 5:14-15).
Developing the habit of immediately refusing temptation is something that we can practice and get better at all the time. We can train our minds to think differently about sin. Some of us have a well-worn path to sinful thoughts and actions firmly established in our minds. When certain triggers happen, we automatically respond a certain way toward sin, and we just follow our well worn path to evil. Once we take a step back and think about our sins and examine these well worn paths of wrong thinking, wrong interpretations, and wrong conclusions about what is going on around us that facilitates and encourages us to sin, we can begin to understand where along this path we decide to sin and where we give it control of us. The good news is that we can change these thought patterns toward sin, and we can reroute our thoughts away from sin and onto Christ and obedience to Him.
One way to do this might be to choose to associate a certain sinful behavior or certain ungodly thought pattern or certain negative way of talking to others (e.g. complaining or being critical) with a new thought or with a verse of scripture. We can practice in our minds bringing up the thing we are trying to conquer (very briefly, without dwelling on it) and purposely replacing those old trails of sinful thinking with new patterns of righteous thinking. For example, if I have a bad habit of being critical of others or complaining about things to others, I can bring to mind a critical thought that I might think and then “rewrite” or “redirect” the narrative in mind to be a Bible verse that replaces the negative thought with love for the person or a scripture verse, such as “Let no unwholesome word proceed out of your mouth but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Or I could visually in my mind replace that critical thought with a picture of Christ healing the lepers or Christ dying for the sins of that person I am tempted to be critical of. There is no end to the creative ways we can retrain our minds to think about the things above when we are tempted and give ourselves a more godly way of thinking about things when temptation strikes. Try this yourself with your most difficult sins.
If a person works at this and practices it enough, you will find that the thing that comes to your mind immediately after the temptation to commit sin is this replacement thought, the godly thought that helps remind you how evil the sin is and helps immediately set your mind on the things above and the path to refuse the temptation immediately and decisively.