Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
When does temptation become sin? Can you hope (in this life) to get to the place where you can be relieved of the burden of being tempted?
You have a grand piano; you enjoy its glorious tone. When it's time to go to bed you think, "Oh, that poor piano! All night long while I rest it must continue to endure those tons of pressure put upon its frame by all those strings stretched taut--I'll loosen them all." The result? The music is gone!
If you have thought of Jesus Christ as a person exempt from enduring the pressure of our temptations, you have missed the point of the New Testament. Its very first page describes Him as "Immanuel, ... God with us" (Matt. 1:23). God with youin your most alluring, nearly overmastering temptations. He was a Man with a capacity for enormous human temptation, because we read that He "was in all points tempted like as we are" (Heb. 4:15, King James Version). There is no human on the face of this planet who is "tempted in all points" as the human race is tempted; each of us is tempted only in our own little microcosm of temptability.
But this Human was also Divine, the second "Adam," the Head of the human race embracing within Himself all the temptability that all human beings collectively endure. No human being who prostrates himself before the throne of God in anguished prayer for deliverance from sin can battle against a temptation for which Christ has not already battled. And the Good News is loud and clear: He endured them all "yet without sin." The tension of temptation was there in His soul every moment of His life until that final hour on His cross when He felt to the full the awfulness of man's sin and its diabolical pressure that wrenches the spiritual nerves and sinews of humanity.
You say the tension you must endure is unbearable? Don't despise the music that only your soul can produce! Sing or play a duet with Christ--He never asks you to do a solo. (If you're a musician you know the joy of doing duets!) You are never crucified alone--always it's "with Christ" (Gal. 2:20).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 15, 1998.
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