Self-Control (Part 3)
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Let me read to you two passages. One really has a lot more to do with the attack of temptation. The other has to do with the defense against temptation. And so what I'm going to have to ask you to do, I hate to do this to you, but I'm going to ask you to stick a finger in one. We're going to spend the first part in Genesis 3, verses 1 to 7, and the second part of the talk tonight on Genesis 39, verses 6 to 12. Genesis 3, 1 to 7.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die.

You will not surely die, the serpent said to the woman, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Then the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom. And she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it.

And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Finger, turn to Genesis 39 if you're returning. 39, now we all know that Joseph was in the, he was a servant in the house of Potiphar. And we pick up the narrative in chapter 6, chapter 39, verse 6.

So Potiphar left in Joseph's care everything he had with Joseph in charge. He did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate. Now Joseph was well built and handsome. And after a while, his master's wife took notice of Joseph and said, come to bed with me. But he refused. With me in charge, he told her, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house.

Everything he owns, he has trusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God? And though he spoke to Joseph day after day...

Though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her. And one day he went into the house to attend to his duties and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, come to bed with me. But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house. Let's end our reading of God's word right there. The attack, Genesis 3. The defense, Genesis 39.

We're talking about temptation under the general heading of the fruit of the Spirit. We've been talking about the last of the fruit of the Spirit, which is self-control. And when we think of temptation, almost immediately we tend to think of the most explicit, specific, and physical kind of sins. We think of the temptation of eat, of food, the temptation of drugs. We think of the temptation of sex.

But there's really a lot of other temptations. There's the temptations, actually, some of us are giving in to pride. There's temptations to despair. There's temptations to dishonesty. And in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul says, all things are lawful to me, but I will not be mastered by anything. All things are lawful to me, but I will not be mastered by anything. And you know, he's laying down an incredibly important, important thing.

Anything, whether it's lawful or good or not, can become addicting and it becomes your master. And that's what temptation is about. Temptation is

is about something which may be good or may be bad, but becomes your master, and therefore it's bad. I, he says, all things are lawful to me, but I will not be mastered by anything. And a lot of us know that we're being mastered by things, and we may get out from under them by rationalizing them. We'll see tonight how we do that. We're pointing out the fact that in itself it's nothing wrong with it, and yet we know that we're mastered by it. Now, temptation, if you talk about temptation...

in the Bible, inevitably gets to a subject that we've got to treat for a minute or two before we get into temptation proper, and that is the devil.

So Cardinal O'Connor recently said that there were two exorcisms done in the last couple of years in the Diocese of New York. And I don't know if anybody read what the responses were, but he was absolutely taken to the cleaners by the papers, by everybody. People ridiculed him. Theologians at Notre Dame University said, nobody believes in a personal devil anymore. How ridiculous is that?

And the problem is, and you have your handouts, by the way? Are you following along? At the very top of the handout, we can't go further into the subject of temptation unless we deal with the verse 7. And the serpent said, has God said? Because the first temptation we're told about in the Bible involves the serpent, involves the dragon, involves Satan. And a lot of us have a lot of trouble understanding

even talking about temptation, because we don't like even to think about the subject. The subject, in many ways, seems primitive. We don't want to be laughed at like Cardinal O'Connor was laughed at. Now, look, first of all, I think there's a real possibility that in New York City, there's some things happening that haven't happened in 150 years. You know, 150 years ago, the churches here were absolutely packed.

To the gills, two, three, four times. In the late 1850s, I found a book in our library published in 1859 in my library in Philadelphia, where I used to have an office. And in that library, that book was there, and it was Sermons from the Churches of New York City.

and it had sermons from 1859 from all these churches up and down Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue churches downtown, a lot of churches that are still in existence, a lot of churches that aren't in existence now. Every one of them was absolutely overflowing with brand new conversions, constantly. Wall Street was jam-packed with people who were praying businessmen every day.

Now, for the last several years, the last several decades, you might say, there's been almost none of that. And a lot of people have said, ah, the church in New York City is dead. And it's not true. You know, I have a little poem I put here, one of my favorite poems out of a novel, that it has its own place in the plot of that novel. I put it out here because it tells me a lot about New York, and it tells me a lot about the church.

Jesus Christ says in Matthew 16, the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Look, you see it? All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not touched by the frost. From the ashes of fire shall be woken. A light from the shadows shall spring. Renewed will be blade that was broken. The crownless again will be king.

Now, yeah, it has a place in that particular novel, in the plot, but it's getting at something more important. It's getting at the fact that you can't kill the church. You cannot, you see. The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not killed by the frost. And no matter how bad things seem to get...

No matter how much the churches look like ashes, there's deep embers. No matter how dark it gets, there's a light. No matter how broken our swords are, they can be reforged. And the king can come back and we can get our blades out and we can start doing his work and march and fight his battles. The reason that for a given period of time in a region, the church can look dead even though it's not. And it's not.

But one of the reasons for that is because of what Paul calls the Cosmocrateroi. You don't know what that means, do you? But you can tell they're bad news just by the name, can't you? The Cosmocrateroi. Paul, in Ephesians 6, talks about the Cosmocrateroi. Ephesians 6, 12, it's the powers and principalities. When Daniel, in Daniel chapter 10, is praying...

And he's asking God for an answer. After several days, an angel shows up. It's almost funny. I mean, it's absolutely true, but it's funny. And the angel comes in sort of sweating like this. And he says, you know, Daniel, I would have been here nine days ago. But the prince of Persia, and that's where Daniel was praying, the prince of Persia kept me from coming to you. I had to do battle with him. And Michael, the archangel, came and helped me. And I've come through in answer to your prayer. What the heck is that?

What's the prince of Persia? And everyone who studied that passage, pretty much it comes to agree that Daniel is talking about there a regionally based demonic force.

A prince of Persia, because later on the angel gets up and says, I've got to go do battle with the prince of Greece. The idea is they're regionally based, the Bible teaches, demonic forces, the Cosmocrateroi. Cosmos means cosmic. Crateroi means a strong man or a tyrant. Cosmic tyrants. You know, what a vivid name the Bible uses. There are cosmic tyrants that tend to be regionally based and do everything they can to set up a kind of spiritual dome over a city or over a region.

And what they try to do is simply stir up the pride that's in us and keep us at each other's throats, getting us mad at God, getting us mad at each other, getting us mad at ourselves, stirring it up as much as possible. Daniel punches a hole in the dome over Persia with his prayer. And then it comes. And the angel says, we got through.

Now, a lot of people, as soon as you hear me talking about that, start to get kind of uncomfortable in the pews there. You know, I say, you're kidding. You sound like a relatively intelligent person with probably at least an eighth grade education. What are you doing? Talking about little men running around with, you know, in red leotards and pitchforks. You're kidding, right? I'm saying, no, you cannot even begin to understand what the Bible says about temptation and

until you understand who it was that said, has God said? Who was the serpent? I'll tell you, before we go on, I want you to realize that I need to challenge up front any real illogical and irrational bias that you might have against the existence of an evil supernatural realm. I say it's irrational and I say it's biased. Absolutely. I put down here, you have to realize that at the philosophical level, an anti-supernatural bias is out of date.

See, about 300 years ago, a man named David Hume came along during the Enlightenment. And in the Enlightenment, David Hume came along and he came up with this basic theory. He says, we now know, science has proven to us that miracles cannot happen. He says, we now know that nature is uniform. And therefore, whenever you read in the Bible an explanation of a miracle, we always know that there must be a natural explanation for that.

We now know that nature is uniform and miracles cannot happen. What happens is, for 300 years, pretty much what David Hume said ruled the roost at the highest levels of educated, the knowledge class. They said, yeah, Hume was right. The last 20 or 30 years that consensus has broken up, people have begun to realize that what Hume said is absolutely irrational.

Because even though science can say we've never seen, we scientists empirically have never seen a miracle, everybody knows that you cannot prove that miracles haven't happened where we haven't been looking, or that they're not going to happen in the future. In fact, at this point, scientific philosophers admit that we don't know what the heck a law of nature is. And you see, there's a bias. When you say miracles can't happen because nature is uniform, what you mean is miracles can't happen because miracles can't happen. That's begging the question. If there's a God...

then miracles are natural. If there's a God, angels, the existence of angels is natural. And if there's a positive supernatural, the existence of a negative supernatural isn't irrational, but it's perfectly natural. You know, let me give you an interesting example. My old friend C.S. Lewis, who was a Greek scholar, always found it interesting that the Old Testament and Herodotus

had two very different ways of understanding the great siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, the Assyrian general. And the Assyrian king and general Sennacherib went and surrounded Jerusalem with an overwhelming force. The Assyrian army was incredibly, it outnumbered the people inside Jerusalem 10 to 1. And all we really know for sure is

most historians say, is for some strange reason that army was defeated and they ran home with their tail between their legs. And nobody is sure why. Well, the Old Testament, 2 Kings 19 verse 35 tells us that the angels came down and slew men right in their camps. And the next day they got up and they ran.

Herodotus, the famous Greek historian, tells us something different. Let me read you a quote from C.S. Lewis. When the Old Testament, he says, when the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels, 2 Kings 19.35, and when Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of the army, which he says in Book 2, Section 141, a truly open-minded man will be on the side of the angels.

Unless you start by begging the question that there is no such thing as a supernatural, and you cannot prove that. That's a faith proposition. Then there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things. Now, you see what he's saying? How do you know there's no supernatural? That's a guess.

Science can't prove there's no supernatural. Science is an empirical science. It observes those things which you can taste, hear, see, and smell. It only deals with the natural. It can't study the supernatural. It doesn't claim to study the supernatural. And therefore, how can you prove that there's no such thing as supernatural? You can't prove that. It's a faith proposition. And C.S. Lewis says, if you look at the evidence...

What is most likely? If there is a God, then it's absolutely natural that there might be angels who could do things like that, or devils. If you say there is no God and that's a faith proposition, then you can say miracles can't happen. But don't you see, at the bottom of your assumption is a faith proposition. And the philosophers of science are agreeing at this point. It's silly to say,

Religious people can believe in devils, but down to earth scientific people can't. They realize that there's no way science can prove or disprove. That anti-supernatural bias is kind of leaving the knowledge classes, but it's not leaving the man and woman on the street. There's still a feeling like, oh my gosh, you don't really believe in a personal devil. And I say, well, wait a minute, here's a question. Do you believe in God? And many times they say, sure. Then what's, you're kidding, right? You believe in God, you believe in a good supernatural person.

You believe maybe even in a heaven and an afterlife. But you're telling me that you don't believe in a personal devil, you don't believe in Cosmic Crateroy, you don't believe in an evil supernatural realm, and you're not even sure you believe in hell. That sounds to me like you've just picked and chosen what you want in the Bible. It sounds to me like a wish fulfillment. It sounds to me like you invented a religion. And it just makes you kind of comfortable and cozy. And there's not only no basis for it,

But actually, all the evidence is against it. Do you just look out there in the world and you say, gee, I can just tell if there is a supernatural, it must be full of goodness and love. Just look out there in the world and say, I can just tell that if there is a God, that if there is a supernatural realm, it just must be everybody's going to heaven and everything is good and there can't be demons, there can't be evil. Of course you don't see that out there. And that's the reason we put down here that it's absolutely imperative for you to understand that there is

a devil, and that there is a slew of his followers and their princes and power of the air. Now, secondly, along with that, before you can go on any further, there's two equal and opposite errors into which people can fall when it comes to this whole subject of devils and the demonic. And there is these two errors, and you can remember them like this. There's superstition and there's substition.

See, superstition literally means over-belief, super-overstition, a belief. Substition means under-belief. And almost all of us, before we're Christians and after we're Christians, fall into either superstition or substition. By superstition, we mean an unhealthy over-interest in the subject and attributing too much power to them. Substition is either a disbelief in them at all,

or generally a kind of writing them out of your day-to-day existence, saying, well, I never have to take into consideration that there's anything like that there. Maybe, you know, in darkest Africa or in the jungles of Borneo, there might be two or three people who deal with that sort of thing, but I don't have to worry about it at all. Superstition and substition. The devil reminds me of a blow snake. Do you know how a blow snake deals with his enemies? When you first come up on a blow snake, it puffs itself up.

Gets real big and real mean and real ugly looking and tries to scare you off, you see. And if you don't get scared off, he sucks himself in, flips over, lays down, and plays dead.

See, in other words, there's only two ways that he can deal with you. He's got to get you into a superstitious approach to blow snakes or a superstitious approach to blow snakes. Devil's the same way. Now, in the Christian life, this works out like this. Christians believe in the devil in general if you've got a belief in the authority of the Scripture. You realize how irrational it is, in fact, how self-serving it is to decide you like to believe in all the nice things in the Bible and none of the sinister things, you see.

Well, he realized that, so you believe in the devil. But there's a tendency even inside the Christian church. On the one hand, there's Christians that are superstitious about the devil. Now, what I mean by superstitious is I mean they tend to attribute too much power to him.

They tend to say, when problems happen, the devil made me do it. The devil did that to me. I need some kind of major cleansing. I've got to have people come and command the devils to come out of me. I'll show you in a minute why I think that's superstitious. Substition, many Christians look at your problems and you look at the

whatever your problems are, simply the way that a secular therapist would look at them. Simply, you look at your problems as functions only of your hormones or functions of your physiology or functions of your background or your family life, your conditioning. And in substitution, you always overlook the fact that your problems are really battlegrounds of spiritual warfare, important, significant spiritual warfare. And we're going to have to look at that.

I put down here that superstition underestimates the role of the sinful flesh. Now, hear me on this one. By the sinful flesh, I mean, if you read what the Scripture says, you will see that the devil cannot... The devil's a musician, but he can't... He's not a singer. He needs an instrument, okay?

He can't just get up there and make music. He needs a piano. He needs a violin. He needs a trumpet. He needs something. And you'll see in the scripture that there's never anything the devil can do to you unless you give him something.

So it says in Ephesians 4, it says, don't let the sun go down on your anger. Don't get into bitterness because the devil can get a foothold. It says in 2 Timothy, it says don't, or 1 Timothy, it says in Timothy, don't put a person who is too new, don't put a rookie in a spiritual authority position because that person might fall into pride and thereupon fall upon into the snare of the devil.

There's always this foothold that you have to give him. It's sort of like, you know, if you lift up, I think John White in his book, The Fight, says if you lift up the top of this piano and you sing a note into it, if you sing a note, if you sing B into it, all the strings will stay quiet, but the B string will vibrate.

It'll vibrate. And when you're done, you'll hear an echo because there's something in that string that matches your voice. And the devil cannot make you do things, but the devil finds strings in there. It finds chords. It finds things that he can play a number on. And that's the reason why there's a tendency for Christians because they, I think I said this a couple weeks ago, because they underestimate the compulsive nature

and deep side of sin in your life, you believe that addictions, and you very often believe that despair and depression and all kinds of these terrible, awful things that can really rack and ruin your life must be from the outside. My parents did it to me, or the devil did it to me, or my chemicals are doing it to me, but it couldn't just be because I have taken my own sinful, selfish pride, and I have played right into its hand.

And see, the flesh is that devious and the flesh is that strong. But the point is that the devil and the flesh are always involved together. You can never say the devil did this to me. I really think that's superstitious Christianity. But it's superstitious to believe he's not involved. It's superstitious to believe that he's not up there playing a beautiful sonata on the strings that you gave him. Marriage is one of the most profound human relationships. But it's one that at times can be difficult and painful.

In The Meaning of Marriage: A Couple's Devotional, Tim and Kathy Keller draw from biblical wisdom and their own experiences to offer a year of devotions for couples. The book is a 365-day devotional that includes stories, daily scriptures, and prayer prompts that will help couples draw closer to God and to each other throughout the year. The Meaning of Marriage: A Couple's Devotional is our thanks for your gift to help Gospel and Life share the love of Christ with more people.

Request your copy today at gospelandlife.com slash give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. And as we're going to see in a minute, superstition tends to say, well, the thing to do with Satan is to yell at him. Get out! You think that's going to do something, to yell at him? Are you kidding? He's been around for millions of years. He knows what's going on. He's not a person who is simply going to be hocus-pocused out.

And we're going to see in a minute that that's not the way necessarily you deal with Satan at all. Superstition and substition.

Almost everybody in this room is falling into one or the other. I myself have bounced back like most of you, I think. If you've been a Christian more than, say, five years, you have bounced around on this, haven't you? You know, you've gotten in with people that were kind of superstitious about Satan and were trying to figure that most of your problems were due to some kind of demonic activity, and then you've bounced away from that maybe, or maybe the other way around. Maybe you were always a little bit on the skeptical side, and then you just discovered spiritual warfare, and now you're bouncing back. It's hard to get a grip on this.

And I'm going to try to help you as we continue tonight. The serpent said, has God said. Eve had something in her. The serpent was playing, but the serpent poses it. He's involved, right? Now let's take a look at the way he comes upon us. Let's look at the way of attack. And then let's look at the way of defense. Number one, attack. Satan comes up and says, you will be as God's.

You will be as God. Depends on how you translate it. In the King James here, it says, for God knows that when you eat of this fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. That's a pretty good translation. Temptation comes from lies.

I don't know what else I can say. I'm going to repeat for the next 15 minutes. I'm going to repeat myself again and again and again. Maybe if any of you really think you understand it, you can go now because I'm just going to keep saying this again and again and again. Or if you want to wait around for a bit, I'd appreciate it. I'm going to just keep repeating the same point. Satan tempts through lies. The Bible continually says he was a liar from the beginning. Satan is a liar.

2 Timothy 2.25 says, You're not in a snare if you've got the truth. The truth is what sets you free. Distortion is what gets you in bondage. Self-control is a matter of getting in touch with reality, with God's truth.

temptation and addiction has always got to do with distortion that's operating down deep. For example, let me just give you some more scripture. When in Acts chapter 5, Peter is talking to Ananias, he says, Ananias, Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit. The lie comes up. In the wilderness, Jesus is tempted to

What happens whenever Jesus is being tempted? Look what carefully happens. In every situation, Satan is trying to inject very subtly a distorted view of God.

He comes up and he says, he insinuates, boy, you know, you're pretty hungry. Why would God let you be in this condition? Why don't you turn these stones into bread? In other words, why don't you go on your own power, Jesus, instead of relying on your father? And see, that's a great temptation for Jesus because his job was to come here and to be our representative, to live a life, a perfect life as a human being. And a human being is supposed to depend on God for everything, so he doesn't do it. What does he do? Does he turn around and say, hocus pocus?

Does he do a ritual? Does he walk around? What does he do? He gets out the word of God and he says, Satan, man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God. What Jesus does is he always deals with the temptation in terms of the truth. If you look at your own life, you will see that what gets you where you've gone, what binds you are lies.

there'll be times in which your head clears and you realize, I don't have to feel sorry for myself. I don't have to feel like I've had a terrible lot in life because God is my savior and I'm going to rule and reign with him as kings and priests forever. And right now he's given me his Holy Spirit and he's given me his love. And why do I feel so sorry for myself? If God gave me what I deserve, I'd be gone. I can't ask for justice. And yet, see, that's when your head's clear.

And you're not depressed. And you're not ready to bite your neighbor's head off or your husband's head off or your wife's head off or your friend's head off. But it's later in the day when you've forgotten that truth and it's not coming through. And you're starting to think, you know what? I've tried my best. And where has it gotten me? And what good is it being a Christian? What good is all this religion? What are those things? Those are lies. That's distortion. You're out of touch with reality. It's a form of spiritual insanity.

And as it creeps in, all the temptations happen. The temptation to be bitter, the temptation to be depressed, the temptation to bite somebody's head off. It comes from lies. And that's why we put down here on the, whatever this thing is, the handout, you must discover lies. Neither the flesh nor demonic powers can make a Christian sin. They are not our king. By the way, one of the greatest missionaries in history was a man named John Nevious. Just an aside.

John Nevious began church planting in a country called Korea back around 1903, and he developed a method of church planting that he thought was going to really help things. Now, the Korean church is maybe the most vital church in the world.

And the Korean church, everybody's amazed at how fast the population in Korea is becoming Christian. It's astonishing. A lot of it had to do with this unbelievable missionary method of John Nevious. He was responsible for literally hundreds and thousands of churches. This man constantly, and I believe him, he

He was a Presbyterian. And, you know, Presbyterians are awfully laid-back type people. You know, very, if anything, they're very unemotional and they drive their wives crazy, many of these Presbyterian missionaries and so on. Very, very laid-back. And when he says, I saw people demon-possessed, I believe him. He probably saw a lot of people demon-possessed that he wouldn't believe were demon-possessed just because the last thing a Presbyterian wants to...

wants to admit is that there's a demon here. Presbyterians like to write it off for everything. He was a very, very educated man. He was a very reserved man. And when Nebius wrote that he saw a demon possession, I believe him. And what he said was after years of trying all kinds of hocus pocus, after years of trying to cast them out with commands, he found out that there was one thing that always worked. You know what it was? Any idea? He sat down and read scripture.

He read scripture. He read scripture. He might read scripture for five minutes, for 10 minutes, for 15 minutes, for half an hour. He read scripture. He says, I got far better results that way than anything else I ever did. Why? See, he was not superstitious. He's not superstitious. He understands that the power of temptation, the power of self-control, the power of the devil is lies. By the way, I know plenty of people who don't believe in the devil at all, who have come to understand that.

They realize that underneath the bad feelings and underneath the bad behavior is distortion. It works. It's true. And it's the secret to temptation and self-control. So all temptation strategies of your flesh and any demonic actors outside are really strategies of getting you to believe lies. So how do you deal with self-control? It's fairly simple but very complex, and it'll take you years to find out your own particular map.

The way in which your own heart tries to deceive you, the heart is deceitful and wicked above anything. Who can know it? The Bible says. Your heart's trying to deceive you. There's demonic powers that are trying to deceive you. Don't sit down and try to figure out, you know, well, is that a demon that put that thought in my mind or something like that? That's silly. Demonic powers in your flesh are always involved in all of these things. So don't try to pull them apart in some ways.

Find out what the lies are, and everybody's map is different. And let me just give you an example of some of the lies that are there with all of us, and then the kinds of lies that can be operating in different people's lives. Look, number one, the main lie, the first lie, the lie we just read here in Genesis 3 is this. Can I paraphrase it? It goes like this. Look at the handout. Sin will fulfill you. It is sweeter. It is healthier. It is more natural than obedience. If you do it,

You will be growing. If you don't do it, you will miss out. You will put limits on yourself. You will be restricted. Now, there's many variations on this, but you see the devil basically came in in Genesis 3, verse 5, and says, if you obey, you'll be held back. You'll cut yourself off from so much potential. If you reach out and get it, you'll be more like God. As a matter of fact, the devil had a real sense of irony.

If she reached out and get it, she put herself in the place of God. She became her own God. So he knew what he was talking about. Just that Eve was unable to foresee what the response would be. So there's a certain sense in which we could say...

That that's the basic lie. It is amazing how much you may find if you know your own heart, this is operating. It's constantly operating. If I'm absolutely, completely obedient in every area of my life, I'm going to have problems in my business life. I'm going to have problems in my relationship life. I'm going to have problems. It's nice to be a little religious. It's nice to be a little moral. But if you go too much, if you get too extreme, if you get extremely fastidious in obeying every part of the law of God, you are going to miss out. That was the first lie.

What I just said to a lot of you, it made sense. In fact, maybe to all of you it made sense. It sort of made sense to me there, you know, even though I was ready to preach against it. It makes sense when I say it because it's operating down deep. I don't know how many times I've had people say to me, you've shown me that there's something to Christianity. In fact, some of you may be thinking this tonight or have been thinking this as you've been attending lately. You've shown me that there's something to Christianity, but, you know, I want to live a little bit first. I'll be back. You know what you're saying?

I put down in the handout this. For years, I used to say, well, be careful. I mean, I want you to come back and you never know. And you really ought to come to Christ now. But if you're going to come back, that's better than not coming back at all. I began to realize that the person who believes that about Jesus Christ can't come to Jesus Christ because you're looking at a false Jesus Christ. If you believe that disobedience is more delicious and satisfying, more life-giving than

than Jesus, then you are looking at Jesus Christ as fire insurance, period. And you're not even looking at Jesus. You're looking at Jesus through the lie. The reason to come to Jesus Christ is not for fire insurance. It's because you know that he is your life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. And if you don't come to him and see him as your life, you can't come to him. You can't come to him as fire insurance. You can't come to him as a kind of sugar daddy. If you've been out there spending all your money and now you're broke and you say, well, what can I do to sweet talk him and get some more?

I mean, that's not the way Jesus is. That is the kind of thing that operates down deep inside all of us. And it's really the base lie out of which all the other lies come. Now, look here, though. Beyond that, the second thing you have to realize about temptation, how the devil gets us to sin or how the devil pulls us away from Christianity or so on, a lot of you almost don't

It seems like one out of every three people I talk to in New York is what I call a recovering Christian. You know what a recovering Christian is? You had some kind of Christian walk, you had some kind of Christian profession before you came to New York, you know, three years ago, five years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, and then you went into utter spiritual darkness when you got here. And you completely let go of any of your Christian profession or any of your Christian walk, and you did everything you could. And now you're saying, I'm empty, I need to come to Christ. And people are saying,

Am I a backslidden real Christian, or am I just coming to Christ for the first time? And the answer is, I don't know. You don't know. But it doesn't matter, because what you have to do is the same under any circumstances. You have to go to him, and you have to give your life to him and say, Lord, I turn from my sins, and I rest on Jesus Christ, and I give myself to you as if I've never done it before. Now, but recovering Christians very often don't realize how they got to

into that? How do they fall down into the darkness? It usually starts with little preparatory sins. Look at your, quick, look at your handout. I keep forgetting what this thing is. This piece of paper with writing on it. Little preparatory sins that lead to bigger ones. Notice what the devil does. He says, has God said you must not touch any of the trees of the garden? Look at that verse five. He says, did, oh, pardon me. It's actually verse one.

Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? I want you to see what he's done. First of all, he's exaggerated. The original command was not that you can't eat of any tree in the garden. The original command was you can't eat of that one tree. And he already came along and said, did God really say that you couldn't eat that? Now there's an insinuation in there, isn't there? You don't think Satan would walk in and say, oh God, that liar, he told you, he wouldn't do that.

Instead, he comes in and he insinuates that God is being unfair. He insinuates that God is a drag. He insinuates that he insinuates. And next thing you know, Eve is exaggerating as well. Unless you read this real carefully, you don't see how subtle the sin starts. Little tiny sins, very small sins. Eve exaggerates. She says, no, we're not allowed to eat of any tree in the garden and we're not allowed to touch any.

Did you see where she says that? We're not even allowed to touch it. Does God say we're not allowed to touch it? What's she doing? The first sin is not when you begin to disobey the commandment. The first sin is when you begin to resent the commandment. That's the beginning. Because you're beginning to put yourself on the throne and you're saying, yes, I see that this command is not practical enough.

You hear that? It's not practical. This command is going to get in the way of something that I want to be and do. This command, I can't swing unless I get out from under this command. I've got to get out from under its clammy fingers. And so the first sin, she begins to resent it. She begins to exaggerate. She begins to make it worse than it really is. And that's the reason why even here you see how sins always begin in the very, very, very smallest doses of

And that's why I put down, if you look carefully, you'll see at least four sins and then five. First of all, she bought the first lie. The first lie was an insinuation that God was unfair. Insinuation. She bought the first lie and so she committed the first sin, which was to resent it. And then she began to desire the fruit, which was the second sin. She fantasized. She looked at the fruit, it says, and she saw that it was good to eat. What do you mean she saw it was good to eat? She was sitting there and imagining eating it.

And that led to the third sin when she decided to eat it. Because, you know, she was just fantasizing. She was, well, I don't think I should do this, but boy, oh boy, it would really look good. She was desiring it. Then the third thing she did was she actually decided to eat it. And the fourth thing, she finally ate it. The fifth thing was she got Adam to do it too. All in seven verses. And all of history came tumbling down around their ears. It starts small.

In many of your cases, it started very small, very small. In fact, it started so small, you still don't see where it started. It started when you began to resent the Christian faith. It started when you began to resent the idea of a God who could tell you how to live your life. The mark of a godly man is that he or she loves to have God tell them what to do. It says in Psalm 119,

The mark of the godly man. What is the mark of the godly man in someone? Is it that he preaches on the street corners day and night or that he witnesses day and night or he prays day and night? It says he loves the law of God and on it he meditates day and night. He loves to have God tell him what to do. That's where it starts. Now, over in the back of your sheet, sexual sin, for example, has got plenty of stages to it.

A lot of people say, what am I going to do about my sex drives? I just can't seem to deal with it. Well, you've got to realize you've got to break it down. If you're going to understand, you have to break it down. It's sort of like time-lapse photography. You can't really get on top of a self-control problem unless you can slow it down into each frame and see the connections and see the links. Generally speaking, in sexual sin, you've got the thought.

It occurs to you. It occurs to you. But then what do you do with it? Nothing wrong with the thought occurring to you. Just as Glenn was reminding you about the little proverb, there's nothing wrong with birds flying around your head. That was from Martin Luther, by the way. Probably Manfred Goodsky probably got it from Martin Luther. Not the other way around. You can't stop birds from flying around your head, but you can stop them from making nests in your hair. The thought occurs, then what? Then if you want to, you can weigh. You can weigh it.

That's where the sin begins. You know, Achan, Achan was a man who was in the Israelite army back in the book of Judges.

And in the Bible, God told the Israelites that when they plundered a city, they weren't allowed to take any of the gold and the riches for themselves. Instead, they had to put them in the tabernacle. And we're told that Achan came in, and when they were plundering a city, he looked at the gold, and he saw it, it says, and he saw that the gold bars weighed this much, and he saw that the jewelry was very fine, and he saw that the robes were very beautiful. What does that mean he saw? How would he know how...

How would he know how much the gold weighed? How would he know how beautiful the jewelry was? He was assessing it. He was thinking about it. He was in there weighing it. He was already resenting the commandment. And that was the second step. The third step is fantasy. You sit and you say, well, I'm not going to do it and be wrong to do it, but I'm going to think about doing it. And boy, it's pretty nice. The fourth step is fantasy helps. We can go all the way with a fantasy. The fifth step

is an action. You can see it with David and Bathsheba. Why did David end up falling in love with Bathsheba, committing adultery with her, and killing her husband in order to get her? Where do you think it started? If you read carefully the passage and do it sometime, you'll see it says that David was at home during the season when kings went out to war. David was being lazy.

You see, there was work to be done and David was at home when he should have been out on the battlefield. And on that day, that was his first thing. He just began to get lazy. Then he saw Bathsheba and he saw how beautiful she was. What do you mean saw how beautiful she was? She saw him because she was taking a bath on a roof and he saw through the window. He looked, he weighed. Then the next step is he fantasized. The next step, he probably did some fantasy helps. And the next step, he acted. You got to break it down and you got to see how it comes on up.

Okay, I got to say something about seasons. I would like you to know that temptations tend to come four special times. You need to always be on your lookout at any one of these four times. It's number four on the back. The special seasons are post-conversion letdown,

Not long after you're converted, Satan will come along to try to show you some part of your life that's out of control. He'll show you the impatience. He'll show you the lust. He'll show you the anger. And what he wants to do, new Christians have very little understanding of grace.

You say, I'm saved by grace, not by works, but basically you think you're saved because you were so wonderful as to give your life to him. And when Satan shows you he gets some of your sin to erupt, you get cast down, you lose your assurance, and you wonder if you're a Christian at all. That's post-conversion letdown, a very, very typical way in which Satan comes in temps. A second season that's very important is whenever you decide to step up into a greater role in God's kingdom.

Whenever you decide, I'm going to do something more for God than I was before. You know what you're doing literally? What you're literally doing is you were back here on the back lines of the army and you moved up to the front lines and suddenly there's bullets flying everywhere and you're going to take one on the shoulder. It's very, very possible because, you know, the enemy aims for the people on the front lines. They aim for the captains. They aim for the lieutenants. You know,

You know, they don't aim for the quartermasters. They can't see the quartermasters from there. And the quartermasters can't do a whole lot of damage to the enemy. But when you step up and do something greater for the kingdom, you're on the front lines. A third area is during hard times and afflictions. That means when you're going through the tough times of your life, there's a tendency to think that a certain sin might relieve you. You're having economic problems, so you're tempted to be dishonest. You're being lonely. You're tempted to have sex with somebody you shouldn't.

It's during times of affliction when it looks like the way of relief to your trouble is on the far side of a sin.

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more.

Today's sermon was recorded in 1990. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.