James chapter 1 from verse 13, this is the word of God. When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted, when by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown, gives birth to death. Don't be deceived, my dear brothers, every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change life-shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created. All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever, men. Well, at some are time, and many of you will find yourself swimming in the pool and with your families, you've got memberships at clubs or neighborhood pools, and as I was reflecting back on my days going to the swimming pool, I can remember a couple of stunts that I find particularly appropriate this morning. And I suspect if you go at the pool and keep your eyes open, you'll see some kid doing exactly what I was doing. This is kind of a time immemorial practice, which is, first of all, if you want to feel what it feels like to run on air, you get a good running start on the diving board, and go shooting across, and you watch those little eggs of a kid kind of keep running, is it to run it on air until, of course, they crash into the water, right? So your chance to say, hey, can I run on air? Well, the other experiment when the lifeguard's not watching is to get back on the pool deck to get a good running start, again, while the lifeguard's not watching, and so take off, you go, I wonder what it's like to walk on water. And so you take a running start, and you run, you get those little eggs going, I'm trying to get at least a step or two in on the water before, of course, the water sucks you down. And it's a stunt, I've seen so many, I was a lifeguard, so I'm constantly looking for those kids who are trying that one, and stopping them cold in their tracks. It's a stunt we do all the time, at least as children in the water. I wonder though, how many of us view the Christian life in the same way? The Christian life is akin to trying to walk on air, or walk on water, and so you get this running start, kind of starting back as far as you can, and Sunday morning you get this head of steam going, and resolve within yourself to live better for Jesus, and by the time you're out in the parking lot, you're crashing in the water even, because the fellow ahead of you won't take the gap to turn left, and so you're mad at him, and off you go, you've forgotten everything that's happened to you in the worship service, right, or to walk on water. You get discouraged, and James here is dealing with a profoundly relevant subject. What is more relevant than dealing with the subject of temptation? All of us face it, all of us face it daily, dare I say hourly, we're all constantly besieged with temptation, and we all know what it feels like to be suddenly caught into a magnetic force field. Do you know the feeling I'm talking about? Or suddenly you know you're being drawn to do something, or say something, or not do something that you should do. You feel this magnetic force pulling you, it seems inexorably, to either do the wrong thing or to not do the right thing, and it holds you back. And so you try to resist, as a good Christian, you try to fight it off, and you say, hey, James force says, resist the devil, and he'll flee from you, right, and so you try to resist the devil. What you find is it only he's only getting stronger. So you resist for a while, until all of you know very quickly, if you're like me, all too often, you succumb. You succumb to doing what you shouldn't do, saying what you shouldn't do, thinking what you shouldn't do, or correspondingly not doing, saying thinking what you should. And then you find yourself filled with regret, filled with remorse, and wondering, is this Christian life really for real? Or is it akin to a kid trying to run on the water, or run in the air? Am I just kidding myself? James is dealing with this very profound subject, and I would submit to you that verses 13-15 speak from James of the path to defeat. In the heat of battle, in the heat of temptation, verses 13-15 speak of the path to defeat, and verses 16-18 speak of the path to victory. And so I'd like to have you look at the two paths this morning with me in our time remaining. First is the path to defeat, and if I could summarize it, I would do it with these three words, doubting God's goodness. The path to defeat in temptation is doubting God's goodness. Seriously, friends, is it not easy for us to doubt His goodness if you're really honest with what's going on in your heart? I think you will find that we all struggle without every one of us, whether it's not having the job that you would like to have, not having the home that you would like to have, not having the husband or the wife that you would like to have, not having the children that you would like to have, not having the life that you would like to have, not living in the city you might like to have. Whatever it is, there's all kinds of grounds for disgruntledness, is there not? Not getting the prognosis from the doctor that you wanted to have, not having the health, not having the talents, not having the gifts that you'd like to have. In your own life, you wonder, you see people come up here on this platform, you hear testimonies in the Sunday evening service of the way God has dealt with people and you think, God has surely been good to them, but somehow I didn't get the leftovers, there was nothing left on the plate for me. And so you have a confidence, God may be good to somebody else, I'm not so sure He's being so good to me. Or if you look out into the world, those of you who read the newspaper and it's one shocking atrocity after another, a mother killing her children, one tribe decimating and killing another tribe, killing 500,000 in Rwanda in a period of weeks, obviously memories of the holocaust, those who are African-American in our community know what it is to suffer tremendous injustice and sorrow here in our own land of the free. I must confess in recent years I find myself at times wondering just how fragile justice is. I remember as a kid thinking, well, surely a 12 men or women in a jury come to the unanimous verdict, surely that must be justice. And we know from DNA testing on these back cases and people being free, there have been a lot of people who've gone to prison for crimes that didn't commit and been there for years was God good to them. One of the men who discipled my brothers and I in the early years came to faith in prison, an African-American gentleman went back to prison for a crime he didn't commit and was there for years until he was released. Why is God good to him? You see, friends, there are all kinds of ways in which we come to doubt God's goodness. And when we're struggling in temptation and those of you who have wrestled with habitual sin of some sort or kind, and you've sought deliverance for years and years and years and you can't seem to get it, you find yourself in our prayer of confession every Sunday morning, praying the same prayer over and over and over. You begin to wonder not only is God not helping you, is God on the other side? Why has he made me this way? We begin to blame him even for our temptations. God's goodness. And you see, when we doubt his goodness, when we blame him, as James hints at here and identifies that we're tempted to do, we find ourselves in trouble. Why? Because here's where we go. Once you doubt his goodness, then you begin to live your life going, well, surely I must take matters into my own hands because God's not doing a very good job. So now I've got to, I've got to order things for myself. And you begin to look for happiness, for pleasure, for delight, for significance, for comfort, for security. You begin to look in things apart from the biblical life, apart from God himself. Now if you're an unbeliever sitting here this morning, you're thinking, I don't accept any of it, maybe. That's the holy path, the word holy itself is a distasteful word, it speaks of repression, it speaks of stifling, it speaks of chains, it speaks of enslavement, it speaks of emisory. It doesn't speak of, to you, of anything concerning happiness or joy or delight or love. I would submit, though, for you Christians sitting here, you too go through the same process. Now you may not want to cast overboard all of God's ways. You may not want to throw it all into the sewer. But do we not, at times, are we not wrestling with, well, God's way and His provisions really are good, but I just want to supplement, could I, can I just supplement God's provisions with just a little pinch of sin over here? That's the way we think, isn't it? That's why we sin. I mean, who in their right mind goes out and says, you know, I want to be miserable tonight. I'm going to figure out the way to be really miserable and happy. And I think I'm just going to figure out how to bring tremendous pain in my life. Now, who thinks that way? We don't. The reason we sin is because we think that's the path to happiness. And we think that as Christians, we don't want to cast overboard the whole thing, but we, you know, as like walking into a health food store, we think, well, we've got our general diet and then we'll supplement it with vitamins. We Christians tend to supplement God's way of living with a little sin, just a little pinch, a little pinch to spice it up. Why? Because we've lost confidence, or I should say, lost complete confidence that God's way is the best way. Adam and Eve wanted to get thrown out of the garden. No, of course not. It's a garden. It's called the Garden of Eden, Eden meaning delight. The Garden of Delights. Now, do you think they wanted to get cast out, do you want to trade that one piece of fruit for everything? Of course not. They just thought, God has provided us a great garden, but He hadn't given us everything. So we're just going to add to all the God's giving to us just one piece of fruit, just one. Just one. So it is, we too, like Adam and Eve, when we doubt God's goodness, when we doubt His efficiency and the grace that He offers to us, when we doubt that His way truly is not only right, but best, then we too, supplement. And I would submit to you, you take a look at your life and the sins and the patterns of sin in your own life and we all have them, they're all evidence that we don't doubt God's way's best. We doubt God's way's best in that particular area. So we make the adjustments ourselves. And what is the binding authority, brothers and sisters, for making those decisions about what part of God's law you'll forsake and what part of God's law you'll abide by? What becomes the binding authority? Well, James tells us here, it's your desire. The word is quite literally desire. The NIV translators are suggesting evil desire, but it's really just desire, it's your own heart, becomes the binding authority for what is right and good and what is not right and good. And if God's got it 90% of the way, great, you'll embrace it 90% and you'll embrace your own way the other 10. And dear friends, once you've started doubting God's way and once you have sought and begin to see happiness and meaning apart from Him, you have identified the center of temptation is right here in your own heart. This is the issue right here. And the reason I say that to you is this. I want you to think about what isn't the center of temptation. It's not the devil. I mean, how many times did you, what the devil made me do it? No, he didn't. Devil gave you an opportunity. It was your heart that made you do it. It's your own heart, it's your own desires that have gotten hold of you and created this urge. There's reading one of the commentators on this passage and he says, temptation comes to you as an idea. It's just a simple idea. It's what happens to that idea when your imagination and your heart and all your desires kind of wrap themselves around that idea and begin to say, boy, if I have that, if I have this, if I can just have 15 minutes of this or that, I'll know a happiness I've never known and your own imagination begins to just run wild with that idea. That's the magnetic pull. It's coming from here. So don't blame the world, don't blame the culture, don't blame the devil. It's here, says James. The problems here are undesires. And this becomes hugely significant as we think about how to deal with temptation, because I want you to stop and think as we turn to the second half here, how do we deal with temptation? Once our heart is the binding authority, once it has determined that goodness and happiness and life are found outside of God's way, to tell somebody not to do it is akin to telling a drowning man, don't breathe. It's akin to telling a starving man, don't eat, because you see his heart has gotten onto the idea that light and sustenance and joy and breath come from this sin and you're telling him, just don't sin, he's saying, what, do you want me to die? That's what it's gotten to. When sin has deceived you and it's made you think that its way is the path to life, when in fact James says it's the path to death. Before we move to the second half, actually I want to think about this notion of death for a moment. I'm going to speak to the gentleman for a minute, because I think I know the gentleman's heart a little better, and I know the lady's heart for rather obvious reasons. One of the things that I think we're tempted to do is to try and derive all of our life and significance and sense of who we are by our work. If we've accomplished something in the workplace or in our work world, we're somebody. If we haven't and we failed, we're nobody, we're in Rocky's words, another bum off the streets. When we tend to live or at least some of us struggle with wanting to derive our entire sense of identity out of how well we do it work, and it becomes an obsession, you kind of get locked in on accomplishment and locked in on making things happen in the workplace and locked in on climbing a certain corporate ladder or a business success path, what happens when you become obsessed there? I would suggest you probably part of what happens is you start dying to your wife, and you start dying to your children, and you say, what do you mean dying? I mean your heart grows numb to them, and if you don't think that happens, ask your wife. I have my wife chronically telling me, where are you? I say, I'm right here, she says, no you're not. She knows I'm physically here, she knows I'm speaking words to her, she knows my heart is elsewhere. When you become obsessed with something, you begin to die to everything else around you, and little do you know, little do you realize what all is going on about you. It's like Pharaoh, and he's dealing with Moses in Exodus chapter 10, and he's suffering one plague after another, but he keeps hardening his heart against letting the people of God go. And finally his advisors say, let him go, don't you realize Egypt is destroyed? If Pharaoh couldn't see the destruction, because he was obsessed with Israel. So it is, you and I, if it's not men, if it's not careers, ladies, it might be something else. I can tell you the number of women I've met, godly women, they find an interest in a man, an unbelieving man, a man who's leading them away from the church. Everybody is trying to chase the woman down, she doesn't want any part of it. She's got to have this man for life, she's got to have this man in order to be happy. She can't have him for her, she's dead, what she doesn't realize is she's dying to everything else around her, she's dying to her church, she's dying to her community of faith. She's dying to her family, trying to chase her down. She's alienating and isolating herself, and she has no idea what's happening. When I was in college, there was a woman who lived on my same floor, an incredible athlete in her high school days, came close to making the Olympic team and ice skating for her country, it was not the US. She came to Stanford and discovered drugs. She came into my room one morning of my senior year with a broken arm. I had seen her the day before, nothing was wrong. She came in with a cast on her arm and I said, what in the world happened to you? She says with a big smile, I found a new freedom. I said, what? See, last night, I found a new freedom, I could fly. She had been on drugs and she jumped out of a tree to fly and broke her arm. That was her new freedom. Now, you hear the story, you probably hear it like I do and think she's crazy. Their friends, every time you and I sin, we're jumping out of the tree thinking we can fly. It's that absurd. My brother and I were traveling in a car the day before Thanksgiving. We were driving quickly and I got pulled over by one of Alabama's finest. My first experience getting a ticket and I was sitting in the, he asked me to come sit in his car and so I did and after he'd lectured me for a good 40 minutes, asked me to choose. I was going to get to choose my punishment. One choice was tailgating, the other choice was speeding. Now, I still contest the tailgating, but anyway, those were my choices and he sovereign in that situation and I'm not. And so I said, well, do you mind telling me what are the consequences of my choice? He says, well, if you choose tailgating, it's four points and two hundred dollars. If you choose speeding, it's two points and a hundred dollars. So I thought, it sounds like a no-brainer to me. Do you mind telling me am I missing something? And he says, you'd be surprised the choices people make. Yes, I want to pay two hundred dollars and I want double the points on my record. That's my preference. Dear friends, that's irrational. Yet that's sin. It deceives us into making the choice of misery. Well, what's the path into victory? The path to victory is this, rediscovering the goodness of God. James knows that his readers are struggling just like you and me with really embracing the fact that God is good to us. And so he wants to beat it into our heads and into our heart and doubting hearts that God really is good and that God really doesn't tend the best. And so look how, in very brief time here remaining, look at how James intends to beat God's goodness back into us. He drives into the fact that God is the exclusive source of goodness. He says, every good and every perfect gift comes from God and from Him alone. It's not from sin. Having that man won't satisfy you. Having the best career won't satisfy you. Having the children that you always wanted won't in the end satisfy you the way you want to be satisfied. Every good, every perfect gift comes from God himself and from Him alone, not from sin. And notice also, it's an immeasurable goodness. He calls himself the father of the heavenly lights. Now stop and think about that for a minute. That's clearly harkening back to Genesis chapter one when God was creating the stars in the heavens. And he says, I'm giving you the lights as light for the world. Now friends, that's crazy. You've got galaxies, billions of galaxies, not just billions of stars, billions of galaxies out there. Galaxies you can't even see but through the Hubble telescope. And even then, it's a little blur. It looks like a singular star, a whole galaxy looking like a singular star. God has spun a whole galaxy for a pin prick of light to the Hubble telescope. That's how immeasurable his goodness is. What? You're miserable because you don't get those shoes. God's giving you the galaxies. Are you crazy? What? You're miserable because you can't have this or have that. Something immediately in your gosh. God's giving you the whole universe and he's recreating it for us. New heavens, new earth. And it's all yours. And what? You're obsessing over this over here or that over there. It's crazy. The immeasurable goodness of God or consider that his goodness is unchangeable says James. He does not shift and change like a shadow. Nothing can get between God's goodness and you. God cannot change his goodness to you without seizing to exist. It's part of his immutable character that he has to be good. He has to be and he alone is good. It's what's an unchangeable goodness. That's not God going to you. You think he loves me. He loves me now. He loves me. He loves me now. No. God in his goodness is unchangeable for you. And notice also it's a redemptive goodness. He has given us birth through his word to new life, new heart, new desires and ultimately new bodies. And finally, I'd say it's an unknowbling goodness. The first fruits, not just saying we're first chronologically but first in the sense that the first fruits uniquely belong to God himself. Brothers and sisters, we too often try to deal with temptation this way. Just say no. Just say no. And again, that's just like telling a blind, telling a hungry man don't eat. It doesn't work all by itself. We tell him, we'll just get accountability. Well, accountability is helpful. The problem is then doing thing to your heart. All it does is create up a new wall of fear and shame going, well, now the law has a face and I'm going to offend and hurt these people if I do this or if I do that. And it is helpful. I agree. But if you don't deal with the heart, you're not getting to it. Or we tell somebody, we'll just think about something differently. Have you ever done this? I've done this. I'm going into temptation. Quote scripture. Quote scripture. I'm starting to think of every scripture I can kind of quote and just kind of get it running in my head, hoping that the magic mantra of the biblical words will somehow drive away this magnetic draw. The problem isn't that I don't have the scripture here. The problem is it's not here. I'm not believing it. As you head out today, you're going to face yourself back in temptation because what I'm saying to you is temptation is inescapable in this world. It's inescapable today, brothers and sisters. And I don't like that anymore than you do. I long for the day when I will no longer sin. That I will no longer even be tempted to sin. In fact, that I will no longer be able to sin. And that day is coming. But it's not today. Ask yourself this then. When you begin to find yourself back in the grip of temptation, in the magnetic draw, when your heart is churning and obsessing over something. Ask yourself this question, what is it about God's goodness? I don't believe. What is it about the gospel that seems insufficient for me, for my happiness? What is it about God that is coming up short? As you see, friends, therein you'll find the root of your temptation. It's when God is not sufficient that you're going to look elsewhere for satisfaction. And you know what you're going to find in your own heart when you start asking that question? You're going to find a hunger, an incredible, insatiable hunger to be satisfied. And if you keep your eyes fixed on him, it will be a hunger for him. A hunger to know his goodness more, a hunger to receive the benefits of the gospel more. And Jesus says, bless it are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Dear friends, what tree are you trying to jump out of for new freedom today? I can tell you this, it's not new freedom, it's slavery, it's bondage, it's insanity. The gospel invites you to come in the feast on the goodness of God, forsake the pig's lap, come to the feast. Come in, let us pray. Gracious Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you that you really and truly are good. And that you are good to us even when we are faithless to you, you remain faithful to us. Father why in the world we forsake you the font of everything good and right and blessed and enjoyable and delightful and satisfying, why we forsake you the font to build sisterings for ourselves that can't hold a lick of water. It's absolutely irrational, it's absolutely perverse and yet it is the reality with which each of us in this room struggle every day. We ask you, O Lord, to enable us to see more of your goodness to experience in our hearts, not just in our heads, your goodness and to let go of the worthless idols and the worthless lusts that lead us to death. Bind our wandering hearts to the otake and seal them for your courts above. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.