Battling Temptation

“For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” – 1 John 2:16

McKelvey writes in his “Liturgy for One Battling a Destructive Desire”: “In this moment I might choose to indulge a fleeting hunger, or I might choose to love you more… Given the choice of shame or glory, let me choose glory. Given the choice of this moment or eternity, let me choose in this moment what is eternal. Given the choice of this easy pleasure, or the harder road of the cross, give me grace to choose to follow you.”

In the moment, the desires of the world feel so strong, don’t they? Sometimes, as the line goes, resistance seems futile. Yet the reality, John says, is that our desires, just like the world they come from, are passing away. They are in actuality fleeting, temporary. It is the will and glory of God that abides forever. In a sense, all of temptation is a battle to choose what is eternal over what is momentary.

It’s a battle that Jesus understood. Someone once pointed out that these verses in 1st John map out Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness in Matthew 4. Jesus experienced the desires of the flesh when he was tempted to turn stone to bread to satiate his hunger. He experienced the desires of the eyes when he was taken to a mountaintop and shown all the glory of the kingdoms of the world that could be his. He experienced the pride of life when he was tempted to prove that God would command angels for him. We have a Savior who was tempted in every way as we are, yet was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He felt the temptation even more strongly, perhaps, than we who give in, but he is also a living testament that these desires are passing, that the One who does the will of God indeed lives forever, just as we now can. 

May we choose eternity in our battles with temptation. As the liturgy ends: “Let me build, then, my King, a beautiful thing by long obedience, by the steady progression of small choices that laid end to end will become like the stones of a pleasing path stretching to eternity and unto your welcoming arms and unto the sound of your voice pronouncing the judgment: Well done.”