Are You Tempted?
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I will suppose you, my reader, to be a tempted soul—for temptation is an essential element in the spiritual discipline of the child of God. “There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man." “Though now for a season, if need be, you are in heaviness through manifold temptations.” Through this furnace, more or less heated, all the followers of Jesus pass—they could not be like Him were it not so.
He was tempted like as we are, that He might know how to sympathize with us, and we are tempted that we might fly to the asylum of that sympathy. Perhaps you are tempted to distrust God—to question the Savior’s love to you—to oppose the divine will—to fret, and murmur, and repine at the dealings of your Heavenly Father—to doubt the truth of the Bible, to look upon your professed Christianity as a fiction, and upon all your past experience as a lie. Poor tempted soul, what are you to do? Where repair? Already you are prepared to succumb to the foe. You have no heart to resist, no skill to fence, no power to vanquish. Satan is too subtle, experienced, and vigilant in this war to be easily foiled or soon overcome.
Already your wounded conscience, confidence, and peace, testify to the perseverance and precision with which his “fiery darts” have been winged. Where, then, will you look? Go and tell Jesus. To whom can you more fitly repair for succor in temptation than to the tempted One? Lay all your case before Him. Tell Him how your faith trembles, how your courage fails, how your heart dies within you, and how ready you are to cast away your confidence, and to part with the anchor of your hope.
Oh! Methinks, that in a moment—the scene of His own long, weary temptation in the wilderness still vivid in His remembrance—He will open every recess of His loving, gracious, sympathizing heart, and draw you within the blest pavilion until the storm be past. Tempted ones are peculiarly precious to Jesus. It is His own temptation over again, in the people of His members. And if there be a niche in His heart deeper, warmer, or more sacred than another, it is where He hides and shelters His Satan and sin-tempted disciples.
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