Only Jesus Knows the Full Force of Temptation
00:00:00.000 | (music)
00:00:04.000 | Jesus was sinless.
00:00:07.000 | He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth, says Peter.
00:00:12.000 | And he remains sinless even to this day. In him there is no sin, says John.
00:00:18.000 | This glorious truth forms the basis of his substitutionary atoning work for sinners like you and me.
00:00:25.000 | But his sinlessness also forms the basis of why he is qualified to sympathize with us, his sinners.
00:00:31.000 | And on that point comes a controversy.
00:00:35.000 | If Jesus is sinless, doesn't that mean he never really tasted the power of temptation?
00:00:40.000 | How can a perfect man who never sinned, a man who never struggled to get free from a sin habit,
00:00:46.000 | how can he truly feel the power of temptation?
00:00:50.000 | But this line of thinking is quite wrong. It's wrong because you're not struggling with sin
00:00:55.000 | if you're continually giving into sin.
00:00:58.000 | In other words, the pressure of temptation is felt most strongly by those who most earnestly resist giving into the sin.
00:01:06.000 | And if that point sounds familiar, it should.
00:01:09.000 | We've covered that theme several times on the podcast already, particularly in episodes on lust,
00:01:14.000 | like APJ episodes 291, 804, and 963 come to mind.
00:01:20.000 | The pressure of temptation is felt most strongly by those who most earnestly resist giving into the sin.
00:01:27.000 | Pastor John explains in this clip from a 1996 sermon.
00:01:32.000 | I apologize for about a minute of static in the middle of it, but the clip is just too good
00:01:36.000 | and the point is too important not to share here on the podcast.
00:01:38.000 | Here's Pastor John, 25 years ago, preaching on Hebrews chapter 4, verse 15,
00:01:42.000 | a text that tells us our high priest can sympathize with our weakness because he never sinned.
00:01:48.000 | With the Father, it was the Son who entered in as high priest.
00:01:53.000 | Now look at verse 15.
00:01:55.000 | In spite of the fact that verse 14 presents a magnificent and lofty great high priest,
00:02:02.000 | verse 14, I mean 15, describes him in another way.
00:02:08.000 | We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses,
00:02:13.000 | but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
00:02:20.000 | Notice three things.
00:02:22.000 | One, he was tempted like you are.
00:02:24.000 | Two, he never gave in to temptation, never sinned.
00:02:27.000 | And three, he is very sympathetic with us in our weaknesses.
00:02:33.000 | Fifty years ago, C.S. Lewis was pondering this text and he heard an objection raised by a scoffer.
00:02:46.000 | And the objection went like this, "If Jesus never sinned, he can't know what real temptation is like.
00:02:54.000 | He can't sympathize, he can't empathize with me because he's never tasted the full force of temptation."
00:03:02.000 | And this is what C.S. Lewis wrote in response.
00:03:06.000 | "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means.
00:03:14.000 | This is an obvious lie.
00:03:16.000 | Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
00:03:21.000 | A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later."
00:03:31.000 | And I might add, or a lifetime later, of hanging in there with a tough marriage and resisting the temptation to bail out.
00:03:41.000 | Or of hanging in there against sexual temptation and resisting the temptation,
00:03:46.000 | not just five minutes or one hour, but year in, year out, decade in, decade out, until Jesus comes or calls.
00:03:56.000 | You talk about knowing the force and power of temptation.
00:04:02.000 | Only those who do that know the full force.
00:04:06.000 | And so, Lewis says, "That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness.
00:04:15.000 | They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
00:04:20.000 | Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation,
00:04:27.000 | is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.
00:04:34.000 | The only complete realist."
00:04:39.000 | Don't you ever think that because you have lived a life of sin,
00:04:46.000 | that you know more about temptation than the godly person who has walked that razor's edge of the straight and narrow,
00:04:54.000 | gritting his teeth in the power of the Holy Spirit and saying, "No! No! No! No!"
00:05:00.000 | And fighting his way through every day with righteousness and laying his head down
00:05:04.000 | and feeling the force of evil upon him day after day after day and triumphing over him in God.
00:05:10.000 | Don't you ever think that you know more of evil than that person or that you know more of evil than Jesus Christ.
00:05:19.000 | Tempted as we are, yet without sin, and therefore knowing the full force of what it is to be tempted.
00:05:28.000 | Let me illustrate for you.
00:05:30.000 | Jesus was tempted to lie to save His life.
00:05:34.000 | Would you not, surrounded by soldiers, spears, a cross in the corner, nails on the floor, hammers over there,
00:05:44.000 | having seen what it was like when they asked you, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the living God?"
00:05:51.000 | Be tempted to lie.
00:05:54.000 | He was tempted to steal to help His mother when His father died. I do not doubt.
00:06:01.000 | There were at least five kids in that family.
00:06:04.000 | Widows don't make it easy. Joseph disappears off the scene early.
00:06:10.000 | Jesus was tempted to steal.
00:06:12.000 | Jesus was tempted to covet all those things, those nice things that He has had, even after He gave away half His goods.
00:06:23.000 | He was a rich man.
00:06:25.000 | And Jesus walked out owning nothing.
00:06:28.000 | You would think He was not tempted to covet His own home, a place to lay His head down every night.
00:06:35.000 | He was tempted to dishonor His parents when they were tough on Him,
00:06:40.000 | and told Him what was right and wrong, and set limits, perhaps more than the other boys in Nazareth.
00:06:45.000 | He was tempted to take revenge when He was wrongly accused.
00:06:49.000 | So often they said lies about Him, and with one word He could have made fools out of them.
00:06:55.000 | He was tempted to lust when Mary knelt down, leaned over, and wiped His feet with her hair.
00:07:02.000 | He was tempted to murmur at God's sovereignty when His friend and colleague and brother,
00:07:09.000 | John the Baptist, was beheaded at the whim of a dancing girl. Where are you, God?
00:07:16.000 | He was tempted to gloat over His accusers when they couldn't answer His questions.
00:07:24.000 | He knew the battle, folks, and He triumphed over that monster every day, all day, for 33 years.
00:07:35.000 | And when it crescendoed at the end, He never, ever gave in.
00:07:42.000 | Now let me close by pointing you to verse 16.
00:07:49.000 | The conclusion that we draw from all of this, that we have a great High Priest,
00:07:58.000 | that He is the Son of God, that He has passed through the heavens with God,
00:08:04.000 | that He is sympathetic with us, the conclusion to draw is that we can draw near to God for grace.
00:08:17.000 | Let me pose a problem as we close that has kept many people away from Jesus.
00:08:24.000 | And I want to make sure nobody falls for this.
00:08:27.000 | Because there are so many people, I've talked to so many, I've heard of so many,
00:08:31.000 | who they get to the crisis point of whether to embrace Christ as their High Priest,
00:08:36.000 | their Savior, their Lord, their King, their Guide, their Friend, and they push it away.
00:08:43.000 | Here's why. Many of them do.
00:08:45.000 | Everybody in this room knows that you need help.
00:08:52.000 | We need help with our bodies. We need help with our minds.
00:08:56.000 | We need help with our jobs. We need help with our spouses.
00:08:59.000 | We need help with our kids. We need help with our finances.
00:09:02.000 | We need help with our choices. Everybody knows we need help.
00:09:08.000 | And there's a second thing everybody in this room knows, in your most honest moments,
00:09:12.000 | you don't deserve help.
00:09:15.000 | John Piper doesn't deserve any help from anybody.
00:09:19.000 | Why? I'm a sinner. I deserve one thing, judgment.
00:09:25.000 | I don't deserve help, so here I am.
00:09:27.000 | I need help to live my life and cope with eternity, and I don't deserve help.
00:09:33.000 | Now what are you going to do?
00:09:35.000 | This is the trap that keeps many people away from Christ.
00:09:39.000 | You've got maybe three or four options. Here's number one.
00:09:42.000 | You can deny it all and say, "I'll be a superman or a superwoman and rise above my need for help."
00:09:49.000 | And that might last a year, a decade, and then you break.
00:09:56.000 | Or you could say, "I can't deny it all, but I can drown it all,"
00:10:00.000 | and you throw your life into a pool of sensual pleasure.
00:10:04.000 | That's a possibility.
00:10:06.000 | The third option is very common.
00:10:09.000 | It's looking, "I need help with my life. My life doesn't work. I'm not in control.
00:10:13.000 | I especially can't handle my sin and my eternity, and over here, I don't deserve help.
00:10:19.000 | There's nobody owes me anything because I'm a sinner.
00:10:22.000 | I have wrecked things so many times, and my attitude stinks, and I don't love God the way I should."
00:10:29.000 | Paralysis and hopelessness.
00:10:33.000 | And you present the gospel to a person like that, if they don't have ears to hear,
00:10:37.000 | they just say, "There's no way. There's no hope for me."
00:10:41.000 | But now there's a fourth option, and that's what the Bible is about.
00:10:45.000 | That's what history of Israel is about.
00:10:48.000 | That's what this text is about, and the option is, there is a high priest
00:10:56.000 | who is the Son of God, who takes the blood of His own death into the presence of God,
00:11:03.000 | and He enables us to say, "Yes, I need help. Yes, I don't deserve it.
00:11:09.000 | But no, I will not be paralyzed because there is a mediator,
00:11:13.000 | and Jesus came to give the undeserving help."
00:11:17.000 | What do you call that?
00:11:18.000 | The throne of grace. Say it again.
00:11:21.000 | The throne of grace is God meeting the need of undeserving people.
00:11:30.000 | You've got to hear that now. I want you to take that out of here in about one minute.
00:11:35.000 | Grace comes into your life when you are paralyzed with the sense that you need help,
00:11:43.000 | and you don't deserve help, and therefore you feel hopeless,
00:11:46.000 | and you're either going to superman it out or drown it out or be paralyzed with depression.
00:11:53.000 | And grace comes in and says, "Yes, you've analyzed that rightly. You need help.
00:11:59.000 | Yes, you've analyzed that rightly. You don't deserve a thing from God.
00:12:03.000 | But no, you don't need to be a superman. No, you don't need to drown it.
00:12:08.000 | And no, you don't need to be paralyzed."
00:12:11.000 | The fourth option is, "I paid for that sin, and while you don't deserve any help,
00:12:20.000 | God will give you help if you come through a high priest."
00:12:26.000 | So good. That clip is from Pastor John's sermon on September 15, 1996,
00:12:31.000 | titled "Draw Near to the Throne of Grace with Confidence."
00:12:34.000 | It was sent to us by Caleb from London, Ontario.
00:12:37.000 | Caleb writes, "I recently listened to this sermon, and this selection especially stood out to me,
00:12:42.000 | seeing how Jesus was tempted not at a singular time by the devil,
00:12:46.000 | but he has been tempted in every way and throughout his entire life."
00:12:51.000 | That point and the rest of the clip is a big encouragement to me in my fight against temptation myself.
00:12:57.000 | Amen. Thank you, Caleb.
00:12:59.000 | And thank you for listening to today's sermon clip.
00:13:01.000 | Our clips are crowdsourced.
00:13:02.000 | You tell us what bits of Piper's sermons changed your life or caught your attention,
00:13:06.000 | and we share that clip with the APJ audience.
00:13:09.000 | If you've got one, email me.
00:13:10.000 | Give me your name, hometown, the sermon title, the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio,
00:13:15.000 | and tell me about its impact.
00:13:16.000 | Put the word "clip" in the subject line of an email and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:13:22.000 | That's an email address, askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:13:26.000 | On Friday, we end the week talking about providence.
00:13:29.000 | We started the week talking about providence and explaining the pains of life to children.
00:13:33.000 | Next up, a question from a grieving young woman, a new believer and a listener to the podcast
00:13:38.000 | who is really struggling to process a very deep pain that has come into her life.
00:13:41.000 | That's the topic on Friday.
00:13:43.000 | I'm your host, Amir Renki.
00:13:44.000 | We are joined in studio again with Pastor John on Friday.
00:13:47.000 | We'll see you then.
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