Resisting Temptation
(My apologies for the lengthy delay between blogs- I was on the road a bit and also organizing a fantastic youth rally at my parish in Spruce Grove yesterday. For Lent, I’ll try to get back into the habit of blogging every Tuesday and Friday. The following is a talk I gave at XLT in Spruce Grove on Tuesday, February 9, 2010.)
From the very beginnings of human history, God has called humanity to be holy. You can see this call throughout scripture from Genesis to Revelation. One example of this is from St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians:
Finally, brothers, we earnestly ask and exhort you in the Lord Jesus that, as you received from us how you should conduct yourselves to please God–and as you are conducting yourselves–you do so even more.
For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. This is the will of God, your holiness: that you refrain from immorality, that each of you know how to acquire a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion as do the Gentiles who do not know God; not to take advantage of or exploit a brother in this matter, for the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you before and solemnly affirmed. For God did not call us to impurity but to holiness.
-1 Thessalonians 4:1-7
Now, a basic spiritual principle is that if God calls you to something, He also gives you the grace to do it. (You may have heard it said that God does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called.) So, this challenge to be holy should be simple: God calls us to be holy, God gives us the grace to be holy, therefore we should all be holy and never sin again.
Right. Simple does not mean easy!
I love The Lord of the Rings- the books, the movies, and the BBC audio production from a number of years ago. In LOTR, a hobbit named Frodo is tasked to save the world by destroying the ring of power. The task is simple: but the journey to get there is not easy, as 12+ hours of film and the most epic trilogy of books ever written (Scripture notwithstanding) says that it was anything but easy.
Our simple truth is that Jesus tells us to avoid sin, challenges us to flee temptation, and ultimately, to be holy (perfect) as His Heavenly Father is holy (perfect) – see Matthew 5:48. So do we avoid sin? Do we flee from temptation? Are we holy (perfect)? Sadly, the answer is no. We see all sorts of evil in the world, we see long lineups for confession -which are, of course, a good thing, because in Confession we are admitting our weakness and sinfulness. The question that remains is why? Why don’t we do what Jesus has asked us to do?
In a word, the answer is concupiscence. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2515:
Etymologically, “concupiscence” can refer to any intense form of human desire. Christian theology has given it a particular meaning: the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason. The apostle St. Paul identifies it with the rebellion of the “flesh” against the “spirit.” Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man’s moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins.
What concupiscence means is that each of us still suffer from the effects of sin in our lives. Simply put, we like sin… or at the very least, we are drawn to sin. We inherit this concupiscence first from Adam and Eve’s original sin, believing that God was holding something back from them, and we perpetuate it by continuing to sin – and often believing that God is holding out on us. Even though Jesus has died for our sins, and by the sacraments of Baptism and Confession our sins are forgiven, the effects of sin are still present in our lives. Imagine for a moment that I take a railroad spike and hammer it into one of the pews in our Church- my sin is the railroad spike sticking out of the pew. By confessing this sin and receiving absolution, I am truly forgiven, and the spike is removed and my sin is gone. Now although my sin is gone, there remains a hole in the pew: the effect of the sin remains and needs to be remedied. Our concupiscence is the presence of that ‘hole’ in each one of us, the draw we feel to lust, to envy, to covetousness, to gluttony, to pride, to laziness, to anger: it’s why we commit the same sins over and over again.
There is a difference between being tempted to these things and actually doing them. There are lots of temptations we face in a day: thoughts and ideas that pass through our heads which we don’t embrace. When we entertain these thoughts and act on them, they go from being temptations to being sin. All sin damages us, our relationships with others, and our relationship with God. We distinguish certain sins as being more serious (mortal) sins, as they sever our relationship with God- we close ourselves to the action of Grace in our lives. We will always face temptations. Even Jesus was tempted. The question is: will we sin in face of temptation or resist temptation, flee from the devil, and be holy?
What I wish to offer you three things you can do to help you resist temptation in your life. I call them the three ‘P’s of resisting temptation: Plan, Prayer, and Penance.
1. Plan to resist: At a certain point, we need to want to be holy more than we want a particular sin. We need to plan to avoid that sin. Whatever sins we struggle with, we need to take an honest look at where and when we are tempted, and PLAN-WANT-CHOOSE to avoid them. It seems like common sense, but it’s not so common these days, like young couples who engage in sexual activity before marriage often aren’t planning ahead/put themselves in a bad situation. As my pastor, Fr. Paul recently said to me: one will never succeed at dieting if they sleep with a chocolate cake. For my wife and I, we planned to succeed in remaining chaste ahead of our engagement by keeping a curfew while we were engaged. As ridiculous as it might seem to keep a curfew at age 25 while living on our own, it was an honest admission that the later it got, the less willpower we had. So we planned to avoid that temptation.
2. Prayer:
The original sin was, in many ways, a sin of pride: that we could somehow grasp something on our own and without God’s help. Without God, we can do NOTHING. Without God’s help, we cannot overcome sin. Twelve step programs start on the right foot with the first three steps:
1) recognizing one’s powerlessness over an addiction,
2) realizing that a “higher power” (AKA GOD!) could restore us to sanity
3) They made a decision to turn their will and lives over to God.
As we build a consistent, regular prayer life, and when we pray about a particular area of temptation, we are admitting our powerlessness and recognizing God’s ability to help us overcome our sin; and hopefully a place where we turn our will and our lives over to God.
3. Penance: Doing penance helps us recognize whether we obey our will or our ‘flesh’ (concupiscence- remember St. Paul’s comment about the war between the flesh and the spirit.) It has taken all sorts of forms in many different holy people’s lives: from choosing not to eat meat on Fridays to walking with a pebble in one’s shoe, to doing good things for other people, to extreme practices that actually harmed oneself. In a wireless 3G, text-messaging, drive-thru, credit-card society; penance seems out of place. Everything we want and do is about instant gratification: getting what we want when we want it. Penance is about building virtues like patience and self control. And yet, if we want to learn to resist temptation: we absolutely need to learn to practice regular penance. Why? Because Jesus calls us to conversion.
Jesus’ call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not aim first at outward works, “sackcloth and ashes,” fasting and mortification, but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance.
-Catechism of the Catholic Church #1430
There are three primary forms of penance: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. I’ve already spoken about prayer; fasting from something (like giving stuff up for lent) is an act of setting aside something good (remember, we don’t give up sins for lent because we’re supposed to always be avoiding sin) to build up virtue in our lives. Finally, almsgiving helps us to stop being possessed by our possessions.
At the very beginning, I quoted St. Paul: For God has not called us to impurity, but to holiness. God wants you to be free from sin- but this isn’t some magical ‘switch’ that gets flipped and we stop being tempted by it. It’s going to take some work, some help from others, and particularly an absolute reliance on the love and grace of God.
With the majority of Lent still ahead of us, we have a great opportunity to tackle the sins we are struggling with day in and day out. Take some time to pray and let God bring up a particular area of sin… perhaps even that one you confess over and over again, and leave till the end of your confessions. Ask Him to help you put the three ‘P’s into practice for the next 40 days (as it takes 40 days to build a habit:
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Plan to resist this sin: Like the dieter who shouldn’t keep chocolate cake in his bedroom- recognize what your chocolate cake is AND PLAN TO AVOID IT. Make it something intentional- and be honest with yourself. Alcoholics choose not to put themselves in a position to drink (staying away from bars and certain parties): take the hint, and do the same.
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Pray! (EVERY DAY!) A great and simple prayer asking for God’s help is the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. It takes 5 minutes to do and can be done on an ordinary set of rosary beads, asking for God’s help to avoid sin (“Have mercy on us, and on the whole world.”) Click here to print a copy of the prayers off for the Chaplet.
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Penance: What good thing can you do without – what can you choose to set aside for these 40 days – to build up your habit of self-discipline?
Remember, resisting temptation isn’t all about you: but you do have a part to play. If you want to be what God created you to be (holy, not impure) then these three ‘P’s are a good place to start.
I’m praying for you.
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