Friday October 6, 2023
James 1:14
Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.
We have what is known as wish-thinking.
By that we mean thinking which does not follow the laws of logic but the impulses of our whims and desires. To strengthen or defend our wishes we try to provide them with a foundation in logic.
There is a great deal of this kind of thinking in daily life. Undoubtedly it is this which makes many a private and public debate so spirited.
It is not so much a matter of ascertaining the truth but of defending one’s own wishes.
In the hour of temptation wish-thinking occurs in its completest form.
If we cannot defend our actions from a moral standpoint, we become the more zealous to defend them on logical grounds.
The process of inner corruption sets in.
That falsification of character begins which consists not only in committing sin in the hour of temptation, but also in being untrue to oneself afterwards. In lying oneself away from one’s evil motive. By saying that things went so badly in the hour of temptation, not because you wanted to sin but because of the circumstances, because of other people, or because of your inherent nature. You blamed it all to these things.
By so doing you lied yourself away from the deepest thing in sin, namely, its guilt; this that you sinned willfully, that it was your act.
The hour of temptation becomes the hour of our life’s great humiliation.
No doubt we all have memories which cause our faces to blush with shame.
We failed. The metal in us was too soft. We were capable of longing, hoping, thinking, and talking, but not of living. For to live is to be tempted.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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