Do not be deceived

James 1:13-18

The year before we moved to Rabat, we visited our youngest daughter who was living in Tanzania. We spent one of our three weeks on a safari which was an absolutely wonderful experience and which included a hot air balloon ride. I have ridden in a hot air balloon only once in my life and I can not think of a better place to have done this than in the Serengeti. On the balloon ride I talked with an American who was studying owl behavior in the Serengetii for his PhD at the University of Madison. He told me that when he came, one of his desires was to see lions on the hunt. So one night he saw the lights of a car coming down the road and thought it might be a woman he knew coming to visit him. He went outside and stood in the dark, waiting to see if it was her. But the car passed by and when he turned on his flashlight, his torch, to head back in, he saw a female lion on the hunt about six meters in front of him, looking straight at him.

He knew what not to do which was to run because that triggers the lion’s instinct to attack. What you are supposed to do is keep eye contact and slowly back away. But he was too scared to do this and turned around, keeping the light shining behind him and slowly walked the 15 meters into his house. When he was safely inside, he turned on the outside lights and saw four female lions around his outhouse. He told me from then on he has used a bottle rather than go outside at night to the outhouse. He told me he came a lot closer to lions on the hunt than he had hoped for.

On our first night at the lodge where we stayed, we noticed a young woman who looked very upset. We were in such a beautiful place we could not imagine why she should be so sad. Then we found out she had come with her boyfriend and sister. The week before we arrived she and her boyfriend said goodnight to her sister and they never saw her again. Apparently she had gone outside in the night and been attacked and carried away. The guides were looking for vultures to see where her body might be.

We drove past a small village where the night watchman had been killed and eaten by a lion that past year.

Also in that past year, some German tourists were driving in their car and got out to get closer to video some lions. The video camera that was left behind showed the lions coming and the couple was killed.

I love walking out in nature, but when you live near lions, you have to be a bit more careful.

Here in Rabat, we do not step out at night and worry that a lion or tiger will spring out of the shadow to attack us, but there is a predator that waits for us in the dark. He prowls, he is constantly alert, watching, seeking a moment of weakness in our lives when we are vulnerable and unprotected, so he can spring out and grab us. This predator wants to destroy us. This predator wants to kill us. We are being stalked by a killer.

1 Peter 5:8
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

We have different world views in this church. Those of you from Africa have no hesitation in believing the devil is prowling around because you come from a fear/power world view. You know the power of the devil and have learned to take his attacks seriously. You probably have stories you can tell about the power of witchcraft and spells.

Those of you from the West have more difficulty believing the devil is prowling around because you come from a guilt/innocence world view. You tend to view the devil as a comic figure with a red tail, horns and a pitchfork. The devil is a mythical figure, not real and not to be taken seriously.

But regardless of the world view you have grown up with and regardless of what you think, the devil prowls around seeking his chance to grab you. The devil is not a philosophical or theological metaphor. The devil is real, not abstract, and not imaginary. The devil is dangerous, not a cute costume for children to dress up in.

The devil is fighting against God and in his fighting, you are insignificant. The devil does not care at all about you. The only reason the devil pays any attention to you is because you are loved by God. And because the devil is at war with God he seeks to destroy those God loves. So the devil will come to you and flatter you, lure you, seduce you so he can get his claws into you and rip you apart, pull you away from God and destroy your life.

The devil is known by many names in the Bible. Among other names, he is called the accuser, the adversary, Beelzebub, the deceiver, the evil one, the father of lies, Lucifer, the ruler of this world and Satan. But the one that relates to the text this morning in James is that he is called the tempter.

When Jesus was fasting in the wilderness, the devil came to him. (Matthew 4:3)
And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

The devil came to Jesus in his hunger and tempted him with food. He came to Jesus who was realizing the difficult path he had to take and tempted him with a shortcut. The devil looked to see where Jesus was weak and tempted him in his area of vulnerability.

James writes:
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James grew up by the Sea of Galilee and if he was not a fisherman, he was familiar with fishing. And so he uses a fishing image to describe the process the devil uses. A metal hook is thrown into the water but only by accident will anyone catch a fish with a bare hook. So an attractive lure is put on the hook. It can be a piece of fish or a worm or an artificial lure. The hook with the bait or lure now sits in the water, moving back and forth with the movement of the sea and rod, calling out to the fish to come and take a nibble. When the fish nibbles the fisherman senses the pull on the string and yanks up the rod and now the fish is caught. It struggles but slowly the fisherman reels in the fish, against its will. The fish was tempted, it nibbled, and now it is no longer master but being pulled against its will to its destruction.

Temptation is not a game. It is a life and death struggle.

James writes:
each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

When James is talking about desire, he is talking about fleshly, illicit desire. Most often in the New Testament this refers to sexual sin but the word has a broader meaning, including any longing we have for what God has prohibited, for any forbidden fruit. For now let me focus on sexual sin.

If we fit the statistics, I would guess that 50-75% of us in this church are having a problem with pornography on the internet. We may not talk about it and for many of us, no one else knows what we are doing on the internet. But this is a huge problem and a major area of temptation.

It used to be that the local community acted as a guard against sexual sin. Anything you did, the community knew about it. The closeness of the community acted as a restraint. But then as technology developed, people traveled farther away from home and were able to do what they wanted and the people in their community knew nothing about it. But even then there were those who sold you the magazines or watched you walk into the movie theater. You could not be anonymous.

But today you can click on the internet in the privacy of your bedroom and be totally anonymous (except for the search engines who pay attention to where you go and use that information to market to you). You don’t have to go into a store and buy a magazine with everyone knowing you are buying that magazine. You simply click and away you go.

I want to say at the outset that sexual desire is not evil. God created you as a sexual being and gave you your sexual desire. Because God gives us only good gifts, this makes our sexual desire a good thing. The evil comes not from having the desire but in how it is used. Sexual desire in marriage leads to intimacy. In the Marriage Course Annie and I sponsor, they teach that, in marriage, sex is not the icing on the cake, it is the cake itself. Sex in marriage is necessary to build intimacy between a husband and wife. Sexual desire in marriage is a good thing because it binds the husband and wife together in an intimate relationship.

But when that desire attempts to be satisfied outside of a marriage relationship, what happens? Certainly not intimacy.

It is very difficult not to get pulled into the world of porn. I search for images for the bulletin cover and for birthday cards I make. I once looked for an image for a injured football player and among the images were some sexy pictures of women. What an injured football player had to do with those pictures I have no idea, but sex pops up on the internet all the time. When I download a TV program, a woman pops up to proposition me, wanting me to talk with her. These pictures are far too graphic for me and I try to get out of that screen as soon as I can.

The problem for us is these images are only a click away. It takes no effort to click. We don’t have to work out to get in shape. Instead of moving the mouse to the top to get out of the screen, all we have to do is move the mouse down to the picture and with just a little movement of the finger, there we are. We look at one picture which leads to another and get drawn deeper and deeper into the porn world. And what results? Are we rewarded with a feeling of intimacy? What kind of intimacy can be achieved when you are by yourself in a dark room touching yourself?

The world of porn is a fantasy world where everyone thinks you are fantastic and no one ever argues with you. How can you find intimacy in a world of fantasy?

When you engage in sex outside of a committed, married relationship, what happens? That relationship too is a fantasy relationship. You get together, each of you wearing your nice clothes. You have fun and then each go back to your own place. You don’t have to deal with dirty underwear or the daily discussion of who is going to cook and clean and fold laundry and pay bills. Even in a longer term relationship where intimacy may develop, where is the security that this person will stay with you no matter what happens? When reality does intrude into this fantasy relationship and there is no marriage commitment to keep you together, the relationship dissolves.

The desire God gave is so often misused and leads to dark alleys of death, not a path of life.

But when desire leads to where God intended it to lead, then it provides sweet intimacy, a safe haven in the world, a relationship where we are loved, valued and respected.

Obviously, not all marriages end this way. Being married is not a guarantee that this kind of relationship will result. Marriage takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But the path of sexual desire in a marriage relationship has the potential to lead to the intimacy we crave.

The world of porn does not satisfy. None of the things we lust for: money, sex or power can satisfy. Frederick Buechner defines lust as the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst. The more we have, the more we crave. The more porn we watch, the more we need to watch. After awhile pictures are not enough and we need to watch video. Then the videos need to become more and more graphic. Then we have to be involved some way or another in the action ourselves.

The reason we get pulled deeper and deeper into porn is that it does not and cannot satisfy us. All it can do is increase our longing for intimacy.

James tells us:
But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

We see the picture dangling on the hook. We get curious and take a closer look. We nibble and the hook is jerked up and we are hooked. Then it is just a matter of time as we are dragged to where we do not want to go. We are no longer masters of ourselves. We are slaves to our sin.

I have talked a lot about pornography because it is such a problem and has such a negative effect on our lives, but the same process is true of our lust for money and power.

Money is good and so is power, when they have their proper place and are used well. But as soon as we lust for money and lust for power, the lust takes over and we become slaves to our desires.

James writes:
13 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.

What is the deception James is talking about? Don’t be deceived by what? This verse goes back to verse 13 and to verse 2.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,

When trials come, our temptation is to say, “God, why are you doing this to me?” We ask why God allowed someone to be so sick or why he allowed someone to die. We ask why we have to suffer so much from financial problems or why God allows someone rich and powerful to take advantage of us.

Death, disease and injustice inflict themselves on us and James wants to be perfectly clear that these things do not come from God. God does not put death, disease and injustice into our lives so we can grow in faith. These things come from living in a fallen world where the devil is active and prowling around to see who he can devour. God uses these things to bring good into our lives, growing our faith, but he does not create them.

When James writes about being lured and enticed by our own desires, he is not unaware of the devil’s part in all of this. Later in James 4:7–8 he writes:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Remember that James was nicknamed “camel knees” because of all the time he spent praying. And when someone prays with that devotion, they know very intimately the presence of the devil. People who pray like this are called “prayer warriors” because they battle with the devil as they pray for the will of God to be lived out on earth as it is in heaven.

James knew from personal experience that when he was tempted and submitted to God, the devil was resisted and fled away.

John wrote: (1 John 4:4)
he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

This was the experience of James, the experience of John, the experience of Martin Luther, and the experience of every son and daughter of God who has struggled against the temptations and attacks of the devil. Submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.

You cannot submit half-heartedly. To use the words of James in the preceding verses, you cannot be double-minded, wanting the pleasures of the flesh and victory over the devil at the same time. With your whole heart and mind, submit to God and you will have victory over the temptations of the devil.

James continues:
16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

When John is describing the new Jerusalem, our heavenly destination, he uses this same image of light: (Revelation 21:23)
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

Light without shadow is a description of a world without sin. This is why it is not possible for God to be the one who sends us temptations. There is no shadow in God, he is all light.

We talk about shady characters who are out to take advantage of others. They manipulate and deceive and are not to be trusted. But God cannot manipulate us or deceive us because there are no shady parts to his character. God cannot tempt us because he can only work to build us up, not tear us down.

When you surrender to Jesus and accept his gift of salvation, his light comes into your life. But we still have dark areas in our lives and the Holy Spirit comes to begin to work with us, to bring the light of Christ into the dark areas of our life so we can see the mess and begin to work with the Holy Spirit to clean it up.

This is an ongoing process and as we cooperate with the Holy Spirit, we become more clean. But when we give in to temptation, we create more dark areas of our lives with more messes to be cleaned up. We can become quite discouraged.

Imagine you buy a new house that was on sale because the previous owners had not taken good care of it. As you step in the front door there is a little place to walk but then there are piles and piles of junk and garbage to be thrown out. As you make your way through the house it is such a mess, every room needing to be cleaned up. Every room needs to be painted.

You can feel helpless. How will you, by yourself, be able to get the house cleaned up? But here is the great news: just outside the front door is a team of workers with huge garbage dumpsters and paint brushes, ready to come help you. You are not alone. You have help with what seems to be an overwhelming task.

You may feel this way about areas of your life. Some rooms in your life are so messy, it seems hopeless. It seems you will never be able to get that part of your life clean.

But there is hope. The Holy Spirit came to work with you, to help you clean up the messes in your life. You are not working alone. God wants you to succeed. God wants you to be so filled with his light that there is no longer any darkness in you.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:13
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.

God will not let you drown. He will reach out to you when you cry for help, just as he did with Peter on the Sea of Galilee, and pull you to your feet. But you have to cry out for help. You have to submit to God with all your heart and mind. Then the devil will flee and you will find the strength to resist the temptation that is pressing on your life.

There is one other major resource for you in resisting temptation. God created us to live in community. We are meant to be in close fellowship with other followers of Jesus. We are not meant to resist the devil on our own. We are meant to be in community and rely on those close to us to help us resist the devil’s attacks on our lives.

This is why I tell people we have to be in accountability groups. We need to create the community that is no longer there. We need people who will ask us personal questions and help us resist sexual and other temptations. If you are not meeting regularly with other brothers or sisters to help you live your Christian life, you are asking for trouble. You need others to help you walk in the light.

Seriously, today after church, talk to someone and begin meeting together. If you have questions about how to do this, talk to Elliot or Connie or me and we can give you some advice. We need each other if we are to walk in the light and cooperate with the Holy Spirit as we clean up the dark areas of our lives.

There is one last verse in this section of James:
18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

When you are being tempted and have given in, at least partially, to the temptation, you can think terrible things about yourself. The devil, sometimes called the accuser, whispers in our ear, telling us how terrible we are, telling us that God is tired of our failure and is giving up on us, telling us we might as well give up as well.

But James wants us to know that God who gives good and perfect gifts, in whom there is no shadow, who is only light, God brought us by the word of truth into his kingdom. The perfection of Jesus was given to cover over our sins. God chose to do this of his own will. He did not have to do this. He chose to do this. And because God brought us into his kingdom, our new “born again” life with him is one of his good and perfect gifts.

We become frustrated and discouraged because we have such trouble resisting sexual sin or resisting the fame and adulation of the world or resisting the lust for money and power. We struggle. All of us, in one way or another struggle, but we need to know that in the midst of our struggles, God loves us. God chose us. God thinks we are wonderful.

God grieves when we hurt ourselves by giving in to temptation. But he never stops loving us.

This morning when you come forward for communion, come in submission to God. Resist the devil. Come knowing you are loved. Come knowing the Holy Spirit is at work in you. Come with a determination to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and clean up the messy rooms in your life.