God gives us choices! So, let’s examine temptation. Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Temptation doesn’t start with God testing you or the devil putting a thought in your mind; it starts with our natural desires for love, success, sex and happiness. These desires aren’t evil. The sin, the thing that makes you feel and live in a way that causes you to miss the mark of the prize, is the way you attempt to fulfill these natural desires.
If you don’t believe God is a good God and that He has given you every promise He ever made to anyone because you’re in Christ, then you lack the basic trust to follow God away from temptation into fulfillment. Peter said we escape the corruption in the world through these promises. It’s like this: when we have a desire, if we trust God and are established in the New Covenant, we’ll look to His promises and in prayer we will loose/allow those promises into our life. If we’re in a hardship we’ll bind or declare unlawful those curses of the law. We’ll then trust and follow God into a healthy way of fulfilling that desire.
But trusting that God is good is key. James says this is why we should never blame God for the temptation or the hardship that brings it on: Do not be deceived, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. God is so consistently good that He never changes enough to even cast a shadow when standing in perfect light!
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