What You Need to Know About Resisting Temptation

Temptation is part of everyday life. I don’t think there’s a day that will go by when we won’t experience the temptation to sin in a variety of different ways—like the temptation to stay angry at someone, to give up, to worry or complain, or to not keep your word to someone who’s depending on you.

Temptation is endless. And we’ve got our hands full resisting it.

I want to make it clear that temptation itself is not sin. It only becomes sin when we enter into that temptation. I say that because I realize many people feel like they’ve sinned when they’re simply being tempted, but that’s just not the case.

God has given us the fruit of self-control, so when we’re tempted to do wrong things, we can make right choices. But if we want to be successful in resisting temptation, we need to know some things about ourselves.

How Well Do You Know Yourself?

Because we have a tendency to deceive ourselves by glossing over areas of weakness in our life, it seems like the devil knows us a lot better than we know ourselves sometimes. But we can gain an advantage over him by studying our behavior and dealing with our weaknesses.

Personally, my greatest weakness is being impatient when things are not going as smoothly or as quickly as I’d like. It’s a temptation I need to put extra effort into resisting, and although it has gotten easier, it hasn’t completely gone away.

Isn’t that interesting? Even the things we’ve studied and studied and have worked hard to overcome can remain an area of weakness for the rest of our life. That’s why the Bible says in Galatians 5:1, “…Stand fast then, and do not be hampered and held ensnared and submit again to a yoke of slavery [which you have once put off].”

See, you may have received freedom and revelation in an area, but the devil will always come back around and try to tempt you. That’s why you need to learn to continually say, “I am more than a conqueror in Christ. So I’m going to pray and God’s going to help me. And I’m going to have the victory every single time.”