Temptations - Part 3

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
- Oscar Wilde

The nature of resistance is one not easily grasped when it comes to temptation.

Have you heard the phrase ”Food for the stomach and the stomach for food”?
It contains the idea that the one is designed for the other. I have a stomach so that it can be filled with food, and there is food so that my stomach can be filled.

If I am hungry I must eat.
If I crave pastry then pastry I must have.

A young child may have no concept of how bad candy is for their little body, all they know is that once they develop a taste for it they want it. Candy for the tongue, and the tongue for candy. If no measure of resistance is applied to this appetite they will feed it – to their own detriment.

At first a parent needs to apply the resistance, and then train the child to apply resistance for themselves.

Resistance is unpleasant for the child – no doubt. It means deprivation from something that seems right and good and pleasurable for the body.

How does a parent apply resistance?

• by removing or eliminating the temptation. (you don’t want what you cant see)
• through fear (candy makes you fat)
• through education (this is what too much candy will do to you, this is why you can only have a little)
• through vision (you want to be healthy so that you can look and feel good, which means you can play for longer)
• by displacing a taste for candy with a taste for something healthier, or more desirable. (you can have this candy or you can play with this special toy)

Without these techniques being applied to us, or by us – we would simply not know what it is to resist, we would simply give in to temptation each time we faced it.
“That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.” -C.S. Lewis*

The reality is that the time comes for all of us that all the techniques above will simply be that. Techniques. We need all the techniques, and some will help at different time, but sometimes it simply comes down to one word – RESISTANCE.

“A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.”
- C.S. Lewis

We need help to resist, with continued endurance. In fact we need more than help.
No matter how many techniques we apply we are still the same people with the same self-oriented desires – who then simply live in “self-control mode” so that we don’t hurt ourselves or others with our destructive appetites.

To ACT different simply robs our souls and bodies of its natural desires. Rather we need to BE different. The word is TRANSFORMATION. Be different, with different desires, different appetites. naturally good and holy appetites.

How do we be transformed? That is another blog.

More to come.
justdonlon

* the complete quote from C.S. Lewis below:
“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity