One of the things I don't want in the wilderness is temptation and yet that is the very thing that I'm sure would follow me into the wilderness, even and especially if I am with Jesus. Even the Apostle Paul said "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." (Romans 7:15)
What is it that gets in the way of your doing and being the person God wants you to be? For me that temptation is television. While the Olympics were on, it was a way to connect with the world and start conversations and learn about other countries and people. Now that the Olympics are over it is just a way to waste time alone. Sometimes it is a good relaxant but often it is just a distaction and waste of time and temptation. It's like the fictional conversation from one old devil to a young one that C. S. Lewis writes about in Screwtapes Letters: "All healthy and outgoing activites which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.'" (page 64, Macmillan Edition, 1960) C.S.Lewis was writing before television was such a great distraction, but he is making the point that whatever distracts us from the purpose and power and presence of God is a worthy temptation. What is your distraction...internet, television, alchohol, drugs, food, fear, work.
Whatever it might be, let us fervently pray that God will lead us not to temptations and when that temptation has a prominent place in our home and lives, that God will deliver us.
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