Knock, Knock, Who's There?

Billy Sunday once said, "Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in." Too many of us see the key in the keyhole, just assuming it must be opened, but a key in the keyhole doesn't mean we ever have to unlock the door! We maintain the right as to who and what we let into our lives - we can deny entrance to all manner of compromise and sin with the help of the Holy Spirit, our conscience, and scripture!

The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure. (I Corinthians 10:13 NLT)

I have heard some say that their 'temptation' is unique - nobody else deals with what they deal with. This is particularly true of the addict. Often their justification for their repeated return to the addicting object, whether it be drug, alcohol, food, or pornography, is that their temptation is too strong, like nothing anyone else has endured. Unfortunately, that argument goes out the window when we consider what our passage says - God promises to show us ALL a way out so that we can endure!

We 'yield' to sin, as Sunday implied, not because we weren't 'strong enough' to resist, but because we looked long enough in the direction of that sin! If we never look into the keyhole in the first place, we would be less likely to invite sin into our lives! The issue isn't one of being 'too weak' to resist - it is that we played with the idea of what it would be like to NOT resist. Whatever we allow our minds to dwell upon for ANY length of time is an invitation for more and more of those thoughts. The longer we think upon that compromise, the more likely we are to resist it.

We need to change our way of thinking - we need an exchange of thought when that thought pattern toward compromise begins to emerge. We resist when we have a game plan. We won't even turn toward the 'keyhole' if we have prepared for the devil's knock! Whenever we take God our weaknesses, we do so because we want a game plan on how we are to face those 'tempting thoughts'. When God begins to show us how we replace one thought with another, we need to commit that plan to memory. Then when the devil comes 'a-knockin', we have a plan to replace one compromising thought pattern with God's Word.

God's Word is our most powerful weapon to counteract those compromising seed thoughts that tempt us to open the door to sin. We won't ever have the right answer to sin's pull unless we allow God's Word to get into us and give us that answer. This is why we spend time in his Word - getting to know him and learning how to yield to no other than him. Just sayin!