- Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Heart
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What are the top five self-reported temptations in America?According to a Barna survey:
1. Sixty percent of Americans are often or sometimes living in a state of noticeable and debilitating temptation to anxiety or worry, and the fear and dysfunction that usually come with it.The younger you are, the more probable it is that you are stuck in the rut of apprehension about life.
2. Sixty percent of Americans are often or sometimes stuck in habits of procrastination.We simply cannot do what needs to be done in a timely manner. Again, this is more a temptation for the young than for their grandparents.
I picked up The Showdown's second album Temptation Come My Way at a local bookstore after it had been recommended to me. I had heard and loved the third record, Back Breaker, but never heard anything from this, so I thought, 'Hell yeah I'll get it.' Frankly, that $14.32 could've been spent on. But remember that the temptations that come into your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will keep the temptation from becoming so strong that you can't stand up against it. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you will not give in to it. Temptation Come My Way Lyrics: V1 / I'm torn and I'm ripped in temptations wake / I've lived half a life im desires slave / Of love and of lust and of life he speaks / In thrall I'm the victim. The Temptations - My Girl New CD 5 out of 5 stars (1) 1 product ratings - The Temptations - My Girl New CD $15.87. 2 brand new from. Then the next time those 'flaming arrows' of temptation come your way, you will know to put up your shield! Free CP Newsletters. Join over 250,000 others to get the top stories curated daily, plus special offers! Free CP Newsletters. Join over 250,000 others to.
3. Fifty-five percent are often or sometimes overwhelmed by the temptation to eat too much.Overeating and the growing concern about obesity is of course not news. A quick click on Google turns up 7.6 million hits for the word obesity. In recent months I’ve noticed many major news outlets running features on the growing alarm concerning overeating and obesity.
4. Forty-four percent of Americans admit that they face temptations to overuse electronics and social media such as Facebook, video games, and television.Young people are almost twice as likely as their elders to become addicted to online activities. But this should not lead one to assume that their parents (boomers) and grandparents (elders) are immune from the temptation. I am a boomer, and I have plenty of friends who have negative consequences in their lives because they cannot tear themselves away from their phones or laptops.
5. Forty-one percent of Americans say they are often or sometimes tempted by laziness or by not working as hard as reasonably expected in their occupations.All of the generations that Barna polled are about the same when it comes to the temptation to slothfulness. Selfishness is a core sin within humankind. Perhaps that explains why people of all ages are tempted to hurt family, friends, coworkers, and bosses with selfish slacking, doing what feels good to them however much it may harm others.
Anxiety, procrastination, overeating, Internet and social media, and laziness: these are some of the most real issues of life.
At any given place and time, say the busy sidewalks of a college campus or the busy lunchroom of a large software company, you could draw a circle around half the people in those places and thereby give yourself a great visual image of the pain, frustration, dysfunction, and destruction caused by our failure to understand and cope well with temptation.
Maybe you didn’t see your besetting temptation in the top five. Don’t worry. Failures with temptation are not rooted in their type or category.
Human temptation has so many variables, versions, and combinations that no list could contain all of them.
Consider one easy temptation that surprisingly does not show up on the list: disordered sex. The unique ways in which it manifests itself in human society are nearly endless; there are almost as many ways as there are people – six billion! So don’t look to the list itself for help. The crucial, fundamental strategy is to look within, at what you want, crave, covet, and desire. From there we’ll see how to rearrange those desires to fit within the story of God and your role within it. And the strategies and insights we gain from studying one temptation are almost always applicable to every other temptation because temptations of all kinds have a common root.
Feed Me!
Let’s take a little pause here. Have you ever thought about tyranny and desire together before? Have you ever put those two words together in a sentence? Have you ever seen them used together in a sentence? I’ll never forget the first time I saw them together. It was arresting, as in put-the-book-down, “wow” arresting. The sentence said something I knew intuitively was true for me, and in that moment I realized I had seen the same tyrannizing effects on others. But I had never seen these effects as clearly as when I read for the first time 1 Peter 4:1-2 in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible, The Message:
Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way. Then you’ll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want.
But temptation, getting my way, and obtaining what I want never feel like the doorway to tyranny.
Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Heart
Most of the time temptation begins with something good: food, rest, God-approved sex, the need to be loved and accepted.
We could go on. Perhaps this is why the first sensation is always one of anticipation, of potential happiness and of greater personal fulfillment. Right? The mind controlled by lust, by epithumia (the New Testament Greek word for “strong desires or passions”), has an infinite capacity for rationalization. Let me call to mind here some bits of common thinking, a few thoughts we have all used at one point or another:
- He/she/it makes me feel alive – makes me feel the most me!
- How can something that feels so right be wrong?
- God wants me to be happy. This makes me happy at the core of my being. How can this be wrong?
- I’m acting out of love – I love her/him!
- My marriage was never the perfect will of God – he/she is my true soul mate!
- I’m the exception to the rule… in my case, I don’t think anything bad will happen to me.
- The people who do not approve of what I am doing are just judgmental nags – they make me sick! They are worse than I am!
Think about the attempts at validation you just read. What do they mean? What do they teach us? I think they are a deep and profound glimpse into the power of rationalization for those who are being tyrannized by their own desires. Our structures of desire can become so out of control that, according to our honest experiences of life, our desires become our most concrete and real feelings and experiences. In time, with the tyranny unchecked, you learn from your experience that there is no me apart from gratifying my desires – fulfilling my system of desire equals me. The honest feeling becomes this: I am my desires. Or I will be the real me when my desires are fulfilled.
But that kind of life is heartbreaking and delusional. Giving into our desires only strengthens them. This is positive news if the desires are good and holy. It’s one of the ways we grow in the grace of God. But if the desires are out of whack, our disordered desire takes greater and greater control of our lives, and we can fall farther and farther into sin.
Do you recall the rock-and-roll musical Little Shop of Horrors? One of the lead characters, Seymour, worked in a floral shop. There was one plant that was fed only on blood. But the blood was never enough. The plant kept growing and demanding more. Maybe you recall the lines: “Feed me Seymour… feed me now! I’m starving! Feed me Seymour all night long!” That is exactly the state of affairs for those who are caught in the tyranny of their desires. They can never give themselves enough of their habit – sex, food, drugs, drink, or money – to satisfy themselves. And our culture doesn’t help.
The Tyranny of Whatever It Takes
When we will do anything, whatever it takes, to fulfill a desire, we multiply sin.
We harm those around us in pursuit of what we want. Our moment-by-moment, weekly, and monthly disappointments generate an unpleasant temper, a bad mood that then gets worked out on all those around us. We inadvertently create and carry around with us a spiritual atmosphere that is toxic to our loved ones.
I know we live in a sound-bite, web-abbreviated, anti-intellectual world, but the way we think about the subject of temptation actually matters a great deal. A generation ago, C. S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters. Using creative conversation between a master devil and his apprentice and cutting to the heart of how temptation works, his book became a Christian classic. In one conversation Screwtape reminds his trainee: “Non-sense in the intellect reinforces corruption in the will.”There is no important aspect of human life in which good thinking should not be preferred and valued above poor, wrong, or misguided thinking. The darker our thoughts, the less clarity we have about anything. It is like driving at sunset and forgetting to remove your sunglasses. At some point you realize you are not seeing well, so you remove the sunglasses and enter the world of improved light and sight. Or if you don’t live in a locale in which sunglasses are common, think about how much better you can see the night stars when you shift your vantage point from city lights to a completely dark desert or beach. This happened for me when I moved from lit-up Southern California to a small town in Idaho: suddenly I could see what was always there – really bright stars.
This same progress is possible with moral issues, with our inner structure of desire and the temptations they cause.
How can we recover sight? How do we acquire more light?
Jesus said He was the light of the world (John 8:12; John 9:5).
In terms of the essential content of His message, the light to which Jesus points is the polar opposite of the tyranny of our desires. It is a life of total and divine freedom within the kingdom of God.
Ongoing and increased knowledge of God and His kingdom agenda can – and I believe will – shape your thoughts, your heart, your desires, and your will, and then your behavior.
Excerpted with permission from Our Favorite Sins: The Sins We Commit and How You Can Quit by Todd Hunter, copyright Thomas Nelson, 2012.
Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Things
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Your Turn
Did one (or more) of those top five temptations hit the target for you? Is there an area of your life where you are internally crying out “Feed Me”? What behavior are you rationalizing in the tyranny of desire? Come join the conversation on our blog! We would love to hear from you about the top five temptations and the freedom that Christ came to bring! ~ Devotionals Daily
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The best book I've worked on, out of a dozen I've written, co-written, or edited, was The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins. Hands down. Not because it's funnier, or more politically pointed. No, I like it the most because I've been told that it's the most useful. It does something that nobody's done, at least not in English and not for a very long time, so far as I've seen. Let me explain.
Every book I've seen on the Seven Deadly Sins lists the sins, and then the virtues they mock or miss. For instance Lust vs. Chastity, Wrath vs. Patience, etc. But that's only part of the picture, and presenting the moral life that way gravely misleads people. Because the moral life is not about looking at one sin, and overreacting to it to the greatest degree imaginable.
Instead, it's about finding the Golden Mean between two opposing vices or sins. That's where virtue lies, between the two. Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante recognized this. Too few Christians writing books on morality have seen this in recent decades.
Lurching From One Sin to its Opposite
As I wrote in the book:
Much of the trouble and most of the self-torturing craziness we find in religious circles comes less from people sunk in deadly sins - though we've got our share of those - than from well-meaning people who have carelessly overreacted to a sin by embracing the opposite vice, just to be on the safe side.
But the opposite vice is usually no better than the sin. Sometimes it's worse. The opposite of Lust isn't Chastity, but Frigidity. The opposite of Wrath is Servility, which takes a sullen, cowardly pleasure in putting up with mistreatment, and feeling morally superior.
Cuckianity Isn’t for Christians
Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Movie
Servility is what I want to talk about today. Over the past few years, especially among the type of Christians who joined the NeverTrump camp, I've seen that deadly neurosis repackaged as a virtue. It pops up in repugnant essays like 'Christianity Is for Cucks,' and in redundant books like The Benedict Option. ('Hey, I've got an idea. Let's start our own subculture! Why didn't anybody ever think of that?')
And now we're seeing it turn up in spades just in time to hamper our fight against election fraud.
The Task at Hand
To fight this, first we need to move citizens out of their cozy comfort zone, which pretends that we live in a 1940s civics newsreel. Usually you can manage that by reminding people (as I have) how from 2016 on, the Democrats slandered, libeled, falsely prosecuted, and unleashed violent mobs on their political enemies. Remind them what happened to Nick Sandmann, Brett Kavanaugh, and General Mike Flynn, among many others.
The next step, of course, is to present the actual evidence that the presidential race was dodgy, as the president's legal team, and on a parallel track, Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, are doing.
Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Gems
Losing Is their Brand
But you're still not done. For far too many Christians, no amount of evidence of massive, intentional fraud will be enough to get them fighting. Why? They've already embraced losing as a brand. They've decided that 'Turn the other cheek' isn't limited to trivial personal slights, as Christ actually said.
No, we should also extend it to bigger things like 'massive fraud designed to seize power in our country, persecute our churches, and keep on killing babies.' Or, over in Europe, 'false persecution claims intended to flood our country with Muslim immigrants who want to impose sharia.' Fill in the blank, as fitting.
For every fight that seems potentially difficult or unpleasant, a Servile Christian is ready to come up with a noble-sounding excuse for letting the wicked triumph. Then quietly feeling proud of himself for his noble embrace of suffering -- even if others whom he should have but failed to fight for will suffer far more than he.
Showdown Temptation Come My Way Rare Song
You Preen, While Others Suffer
For instance, the fight over whether Joe Biden will take the White House will have big implications for Christians here at home. But it's life or death for Christians over in Syria. The Biden team has clearly signaled that it intends to help al Qaeda jihadis (the so-called 'moderate rebels' John McCain vouched for) take power in Damascus.
I fondly remember al Qaeda for bombing my home town, New York City. More recently, these 'Syrian rebels' marched off to kill Christians in Armenia. And now they hope to ethnically cleanse a million Syrian Christians, countless Alawites, Yazidi, and other religious minorities from Syria. Biden wants to help them, for reasons unclear to me. If we let him take office fraudulently, hundreds of churches will burn.
But thousands of Servile Christians cheeks will flush with a quiet, 'humble' pride, as they congratulate themselves on 'taking the high road,' and 'putting country over party,' and even 'not embarrassing themselves' by getting 'down in the mud' with Trump and his backers. I tell you solemnly, echoing Jesus, such people 'already have their reward.'
Losers Face Temptations, Too
Yes, there are temptations entailed in winning. You might become a bully. Throwing your weight around, you might fall into Vainglory, or succumb to the snares of Wrath. Societies where Christians wielded power sometimes practiced gross intolerance.
Guess what? The devil doesn't pass up any opportunities.
There are plenty of equally grave temptations that losers face. Especially those who surrendered without a fight. People subject to oppression, like 'dhimmi' Christians in the Middle East, are tempted to resentment, even bitter Envy. Those who get smacked down by the State for preaching the Gospel might be stung to greater zeal -- or else fall into Sloth, and the comfy slough of despair.
It's true that persecution produces rare flowers like heroes and martyrs, who wing it into heaven. You know what else it generates? Huge numbers of ordinary people who break under the pressure, renounce their faith, and merit hell.
Ground Down Until they Accepted Islam
The Christian Middle East wasn't converted to Islam quickly, by the sword. Instead, over several centuries, it was inexorably ground down. One Christian after another got fed up with stepping aside on the sidewalk to make way for any Muslim. With wearing special badges, accepting servile professions, and generally living like an ex-slave in the Jim Crow South of 1890.
Even worse, parents knew that raising their children as Christians guaranteed them the same humiliation, generation after generation. So gradually, most Christians in those lands gave up the Faith.
That's all Servility gets you in the end: all the way to hell, by the scenic route.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of 'God, Guns, & the Government.'