Good evening, and welcome to Desiring God Live. My name is Scott Anderson, the Executive Director here at Desiring God Ministries, and we’re coming to you live from our studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thanks for watching. It is a joy to have you with us.

Our guest tonight is pastor and author Dr. Russell Moore, who as of this month has a new book out entitled Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ. It is published by Crossway Books, our partner in ministry for this broadcast. We’re going to be discussing this book on the broadcast tonight.

Dr. Russell Moore is the Dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s a native of Mississippi. He received his theological education at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and then he also received a PhD from Southern. Besides his school responsibilities and his writing ministry, he also serves as a preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, and he is also a senior editor for the magazine “Touchstone.” He has written several other books published by Crossway as well, including The Kingdom of Christ, Adopted for Life, and Tempted and Tried. Russell is married to Maria, and they have four sons. Russell, it is a joy to have you on the broadcast tonight.

It’s great to be with you, Scott. Thank you.

I’d like to just open up with some biographical questions just so our audience can get to know you a little bit. Tell us a little bit of your spiritual story of faith. How did you come to know Christ as your Savior? And how did you come to be in the ministry’s position where you’re at today?

Well, I grew up in a very good church, a church that had been pastored by my grandfather who died when I was very young. I was six or seven when he died, but he left a legacy in our family and in that church. And just growing up in that church, I heard the gospel preached very clearly. I heard of the blood of Christ, of the necessity for new birth, and those things. When I was about 12 years old, I came to know Christ personally. Actually, that happened as I was walking.

Every night I would walk and would just look at the stars. I was seeking the Lord. I was praying and I realized I didn’t know Christ and cried out for mercy at that point and came to know the Lord Jesus. And then very, very early on I sensed a call to ministry. I went to see my pastor and I said, “I think I’m being called maybe to preach.” I was probably 12 at the time. It was very soon after my conversion. He said, “Okay, well, you’re going to preach in two weeks.” I said, “I don’t know how to preach,” and he said, “Well, I’ll teach you how.” So sure enough, two weeks later as a 12-year-old, I got up and preached this six-minute sermon. I threw up immediately before and immediately after, and it was horrible and I hope there’s no tape that’s in existence.

I was going to say we need the audio for that.

It was awful. But he really knew how to do this, that I needed to be thrown out there. Then I kind of walked away from it for a long time. I went into politics and was a very young man in the political arena. I was working for a United States congressman who is a great man, a man of integrity. While I was there serving with him in Washington D.C., the Library of Congress had these discard books that they would let congressional staffers have. You could have whatever you wanted, and I would go through finding things. I picked this Free Will Baptist Pastor’s Manual on how to do weddings, funerals, and that kind of thing. It wasn’t until I got home that night that I thought, “Why do I want this? Why would I need this when I want to be governor of Mississippi?” That was my aspiration in life. The Lord used that, I think, to start showing me that my affections really were in a different direction, and so I rekindled the call that I had experienced as a young boy.

When did you end up going to seminary and knowing that that was going to be a course of action and then a PhD would follow? When did that crystallize for you?

The minute that I decided I needed to rekindle this call to ministry and accept the way that the Lord is calling me, I was going to train and prepare for ministry. I’m not sure how the rest of it happened. I don’t think there was any strategic decision being made. Everything just seemed right at the time.

Excellent. Tell us a little bit about your family. I know adoption is close to your heart. I’d like our audience to know a little bit more about Maria and about the boys and your life. Tell us that story.

My wife Maria and I married in 1994, and we have four sons. Our first two sons were adopted from a Russian orphanage in 2002. They were about a year old at the time. They’re nine now. And then we have our two other sons who came along the more typical way, though surprises to us, Samuel and Jonah. Samuel is five and Jonah is four.

That’s right. You have written on adoption. I know adoption as a gospel theological word is important to you along with the connections between that and adoption as parents. Do you want to talk about that just briefly?

Well, I think that going through the adoption process sparked me to think about the Fatherhood of God in ways that I hadn’t thought about very clearly before, and I think some of that shows up in what I talk about in this book. But really realizing that the Fatherhood of God isn’t just a metaphor for “God loves us and he’s there,” although that’s true. There’s a very specific meaning that comes through His relationship with the Lord Jesus that we share by being adopted into the family of God. So wrestling with those issues in the adoption process actually caused me to have to wrestle through a lot of things.

And it ultimately birthed that book. I’d like to know what birthed this book then. We’re here tonight mainly to talk about Tempted and Tried. I’m curious as to what’s the story behind this book? Why did you write it?

I think it all goes back to a conversation I had in my office. A guy came to see me, and he said, “I think I’m lost.” Now, I talk to people all the time, I know you probably do too, who are wrestling with assurance. He said, “There’s no way that I can be a Christian.” So I started asking the kinds of questions I normally ask, “Why don’t you think you’re a Christian?” He had a very solid testimony, a confession of faith in Christ. I said, “Well, what’s wrong then?” He said, “Well, I’m just miserable.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, I’m just wrestling all the time and struggling against sin. There’s no way I can be a Christian. It’s just always fighting.” I said, “Well, me too.” He said, “No, you don’t understand. I’m this close to the edge all the time.” I said, “Me too.” And he said, “No.”

He said, “Let me put it to you this way” — and I’ll never forget him saying this — “if you could prove to me right now that the bones of Jesus are in the ground in the Middle East, I would immediately leave here and get as drunk as I could possibly get, take every drug I could find, and just go wild.” I said, “I would too.” And he said, “What?” I said, “Of course. The Bible says that’s exactly what we ought to do. If Christ has not been raised, then eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you’ll die.” I said, “But the real question is, do you believe the bones of Jesus are in the ground in the Middle East?” And he said, “No. I believe Jesus has been raised, and that’s the reason that I’m fighting and struggling all the time.”

I said to him, “What you’re experiencing is called the Holy Spirit. This is what the Christian life looks like.” And as I was walking him through this, I realized there are so many Christians who think that everyone else sitting around them, in any given church service or in any given small group Bible study, is living in this realm of perfect tranquility. They’re just humming hymns to themselves all the time. That’s not what the Christian life looks like. So when somebody experiences that normal battle and struggle against temptation because it’s so tempestuous, they assume, “I must not be a Christian. Something must be freakishly wrong with me.” When in reality, this is exactly what the Spirit is doing in the life of a believer.

Interesting. Before I get to a question about the thesis of your book, you mention in the book at one place that our temptation is to think about temptation as being normal, like a normal part of the fabric of the universe. My question for you is, “Is that true? Is this really just the way things are supposed to be?”

Well, one of the things I think is difficult for Christians to understand is that it’s hard for us to know what is normal and what is abnormal. We all think of things being normal in relation to whatever is in our experience. School teachers will sometimes tell me that if they’re talking with kids who come out of abusive families and situations, one of the first things they have to do is to recalibrate, “Hey, this is what normal looks like. What you’ve experienced isn’t normal at all. It isn’t normal to have a dad screaming at you all the time. It isn’t normal to live in a place where people are shooting at one another,” or whatever the background is.

We’re in a very similar situation because we live in a fallen world and we are sinners. And so what we’re accustomed to and what we see in ourselves and around us, we assume, “Well, this is just normal.” Well, yeah, it’s because we’re living in an abusive situation and we don’t see what God defines as normal. And what God defines as normal humanity is the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. He isn’t the exception. He is God’s purpose and God’s design for humanity. That’s the normality that we’re being driven toward.

So what we’re living in is a war zone. This isn’t normal life. This is a universe that has been taken captive by hostile powers that Jesus is uprooting through the gospel. So the minute that we start realizing that, things change. Everything that I see and everything that I know around me, as John says in 1 John 5, is “under the sway of the wicked one.” So what? He says, “So little children keep yourselves from idols.” But we have to be reminded of that consistently.

I appreciated that about the book. I think sometimes maybe in our circles that there can be a right emphasis on sin, but it sands the demonic influence aspect, that there’s a cosmic battle out there, there’s a war being waged and that type of thing. We’re going to touch on that in a minute, but let me go back to what I feel like was the crux thesis of the book here. I wonder if you’d comment on this. A key aspect in fighting temptation is really reclaiming this issue of identity, remembering who I am. You gave one example from your own life and you mentioned in the storyline of that example, “I had forgotten who I was and who I am.” How is remembering our identity essential in the fight agsinst temptation?

What made me think about that, I mentioned in the book, was an incident when I was taking my family on a road trip. I don’t know how many of you watching are familiar with having small children in a minivan fighting with one another, saying, “He took my Legos.” We were driving on this long trip, it was pouring down rain. We stopped midway to where we were going and we were going to spend the night. I ran into the hotel to go and check us in. This young woman who was working behind the desk reminded me of someone that I had known in college. I just found myself at that moment not doing anything particularly wrong and not really even thinking anything particularly wrong. I just found myself enjoying talking to her.

I then heard my son yell out, “Daddy,” and it broke the illusion. I had forgotten there for a moment who I was. I think a lot of people experience that. When they’re being driven into temptation, there’s an illusion that I can be someone else, or I can be who it is that I want to be in any given situation. What we have to remember is not only who we are in terms of our responsibilities, but also to remember who we are in Christ.

That’s why when you go through the New Testament, the New Testament is consistently laying out the gospel, and not to unbelievers, which a lot of Christians assume the gospel is something that we give to unbelievers so that they can then become Christians. That’s true, the gospel is necessary to take someone from being an unbeliever to a believer, but then the gospel is consistently being rehearsed so that Paul will say, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 15:1–4:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures . . .

We must remember who it is that we are in Christ so that we break the illusion that comes to us from those voices that will say, “You can be a god and you will not surely die,” or, “You’re just an animal. Just follow your impulses toward wherever you want to go.” It takes gospel identity to break that spell.

In the first couple of chapters of the book, you kind of do an unpacking. We take a peek underneath the hood to see the anatomy of how the universe is framed with reference to indwelling sin and with reference to real demons that really want to coddle and captivate and things like that. You mention this: “The sheer animal force of temptation ought to remind us of something: the universe is demon-haunted.” So here’s a question for you, what is the role of Satan and demons in the process of temptation? Are they our tempters? Are they the ones doing the temptation? Are they the first cause of temptation? What’s going on with respect to my indwelling sin and demons that are out there?

I think in Scripture you have a conspiracy, if you will, between the world, the flesh, and the devil. So I am fallen, so I have impulses that are driven toward the self and driven toward sin, toward rebellion against God. There’s also an environment around me, as we were talking a few minutes ago, which seems to be normal to me in this world, in which it’s not just that I am a sinner but others are. You think about what Isaiah said when he saw the glory of God in the temple. He said, “I am unclean and I dwell among a people who are unclean.” The same is true for us, and that furthers us in our sin. But then there are also, the Bible says, these evil spiritual beings, these principalities and powers over this present darkness who are seeking to destroy us. They’re watching us to see where it is that we’re vulnerable.

So if you look through the storyline of Scripture, not everyone is designed to fall in the same ways. I think Christians, if you spend a lot of time talking to one another, you’ll know some things that tempt me don’t tempt you, and some things that tempt you wouldn’t tempt me. The powers are looking for where are those weak points, where are those vulnerable points? And then it seems to me that the satanic powers offer you that. They seek to cover over when you are moving into sin there and to conspire with you, saying, “It’s going to be okay.”

I mean, think about when the serpent is speaking to Eve, to our mother, and he says to her, “You’re not going to die. Everything’s going to be okay.” Well, that’s the pattern of temptation. That happens in every human life. They say, “It really is going to be okay,” until the satanic powers get you at a certain point, they uncover it, and then they accuse. And that’s the power that they have, is the power of accusation. The reason that they’re so powerful there is because they’re right. When they ultimately turn around and say, “You are guilty and you belong with us in the condemnation that we have incurred,” they’re right. It takes the gospel to make them wrong.

So they’re right about every single human being except for one. Our Lord Jesus was not afraid of their accusations because he had never been in a conspiracy with them. So he was able to say, “The ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me.” So every time these demons start speaking to Jesus in the gospels, Jesus doesn’t cower and hide because he has nothing to be ashamed of. He just says, “Shut up. Come out of her. Come out of him,” and they do. That’s the pattern I think that these powers follow.

So they’ve had millennia to study the human frame and observe personality traits and weaknesses and such, and then they cultivate a custom-made package at any given point in our lives. You use a really powerful illustration in the book about the humane treatment of cows that are on their way to the slaughterhouse. Unpack that for us a little bit as that relates to this idea of being lured in and cultivated really by demonic forces to fall into sin.

I heard an interview one time with a woman by the name of Temple Grandin. She’s an autistic, highly functioning autistic woman who’s a brilliant scientist, agricultural researcher, and she knows animal nature particularly. She can empathize with animals, something that very early on in her life she realized she could tell when animals make certain sounds what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling. She has become a consultant to the meat packing industry, essentially to slaughterhouses. And so she will go into these slaughterhouses and teach them how to get a cow killed with kindness. What she’s saying is you really don’t want to slaughter a cow with the cow stressed, because it releases these stress hormones. You’re not going to have good quality meat.

So she says to them, “What you need to do is to make sure that there’s nothing novel.” She says, “Don’t even drape a jacket over a fence that’s not ordinarily there. You want the cow to see nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t prod the cow, don’t yell at the cow. Instead, just take the cow through these gently curving slopes so that the cow thinks that he is going out to pasture, to a good place.” And then just at the very end there’s a machine that she invented that she calls the stairway to heaven, that just gently squeezes the cow, lifts the cow up, and before the cow even knows what has happened, the cow is slaughtered.

I heard her talking about this and I was thinking, “Scripture continually is saying to us that the process of destruction is like a lamb to the slaughter, like an ox to the slaughter.” She understands something about animal nature that God has already laid out in Scripture. That’s exactly the pattern that God says is happening to us. There are beings cultivating us who don’t want to alarm us, which is why temptation never comes to us in its full gore. It always comes to us in these little gradual progressions so that we become more and more acculturated to it before it comes to us with full violence.

I think the best illustration of that in Scripture is in Proverbs 7, in which the father is saying to the son, “This is what happens.” The son, he goes out into the street and he happens to meet this woman. It happens to be at night. Her husband happens to be away, happens to be away for a long period of time. And everything just seems to be falling into place little by little by little by little until suddenly the father says at the end, “He’s like an ox to the slaughter. He’s like a bird that’s been caught. It just suddenly comes upon you.”

That’s exactly what happens. We never see the full force at the very beginning. Instead, the powers want to cultivate those little impulses. For instance, if someone has a tendency toward rage, toward a temper, never do the satanic powers immediately appeal to you with a violent outburst. Instead, it’s just teaching you how to lose self-control a little at a time until you just become the kind of person who doesn’t know how to control those little impulses. And now they’re big impulses. The same thing happens with adultery, with pornography, with materialism, envy, and covetousness. All of those things, they come a little at the time.

That’s a very helpful section partly because of the stark reality of the slaughterhouse language, and then you show how that’s used in Scripture, but also because you couple that then with the predatory aspect of being hunted and seeking whom he may devour and such. Let me ask you this question then, the title of your book, Tempted and Tried. Here’s a question for you, what is the difference then between being tempted by demons, presumably, versus being tried by God? Are you just horsing around with language there, or is there really a difference? Is there a causal difference there? What’s the difference between temptation from demons and being tried by God?

If you look at the book of James, he tells us there that God is putting us through trials, that you ought not to be surprised by trials, and there’s a purpose to the trial. God is refining you. He is conforming you into the image of Christ, making you into who it is that you are to be. At the same time, James says, “When you’re being tempted, let no one say I’m being tempted by God.” God does not tempt you. Instead, you’re being tempted by the devil and by the agents of the devil. So those are two very different things. What’s the difference? Well, the difference is intention primarily.

The demonic powers are seeking to destroy you. They’re putting the things in front of you that they think will entice your sinful nature to destroy you. What God is doing instead, the Scripture says, is allowing you to go through times of temptation. He is not tempting you, but he is allowing you to go through times of temptation knowing what it is that you can bear. Paul says to the church at Corinth, “You’re never going to be tempted in a way except that is common to man.” So no matter what you’re being tempted by, there’s no new temptation. You’re not a freak. You’re being tempted by something that is common to man. And you’re never going to be tempted with something that is too much for you to be able to bear. There is always a way of escape.

In the life of the believer, God is doing exactly what he did in the life of Job. Job is going through a trial. God is putting him through it. He’s showing and demonstrating what Job is really about. But what is Satan trying to do? He is tempting Job to curse God and die, for instance, through the counsel of his wife. He wants to destroy Job. But what does God do with Job? God says to Satan, “You can come this far and you can’t come any further.” Same thing happens in the life of the believer. So there’s always that means of escape from the temptation.

Let me poke on that a little bit more. What is the Spirit’s role specifically regarding temptation? I’m thinking of the fact that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit. How does that square with what Jesus taught us to pray, namely, “Lead us not into temptation.”? Maybe talk a little bit about what’s going on in Jesus’s life after His baptism, being led away and how that relates to us. Are we led into temptation by the Spirit even though we’re praying that he wouldn’t?

Well, the Spirit drives Jesus after the baptism into the desert to be tested, the Scripture tells us. God is not there tempting Jesus. God is not seeking to destroy Jesus, but he takes him through this time of temptation. Notice in that prayer what Jesus says, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” — literally from the evil one. And so what Jesus is teaching us to pray is, “Keep me safe from temptation. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me.” We’re praying for a deliverance from the evil one and from his schemes.

Are you saying we should interpret then any given moment or season of temptation and struggle at the same time as both real temptation where demons want to destroy the image of Christ in me, and at the same time, this is being allowed by God and is itself a trial that the Father has put out there?

Yes. Think about, for instance, in the life of the apostle Paul. He says, “I have this thorn in the flesh.” He says, “It’s a messenger of Satan, and it is to keep me from exalting myself so that the gospel can go forward.” Now, where’s that coming from? Is it coming from Satan or is it coming from God? Well, what is Satan trying to do? He’s trying to destroy the apostle Paul. Satan is not saying, “Well, we want to make sure that the gospel gets to the nations. One thing that’s going to prevent the gospel from getting to the nations is Paul being full of himself, so let’s humble him down.”

No, no, no, Satan is trying to destroy him. But what’s Paul saying? Even in that, what is God doing? He is turning this around on Satan so that his purposes prevail. That’s what God always does. I mean, that’s why we’re even here, that’s what happened in the crucifixion. Judas is filled with Satan and seeking to destroy Jesus. And what happens? He unwittingly finds himself falling into God’s plan to redeem the world through the crucifixion. So God always turns those schemes of the devil around ultimately on his own hand.

There were several places, Russell, in the book where they were “aha” moments. I was illumined in my own understanding of the Scripture as well as really practically helped. One of those sections in the book you said the following:

Temptation is strong in our lives precisely because it’s not about us. Temptation is an assault by the demonic powers on the rival empire of the Messiah. It’s because we resemble Jesus, our firstborn brother.

Talk to us a little bit about how temptation is really not about us.

If you look at Revelation 12, John, on this island in exile, sees the whole picture of human history. What he sees is a woman giving birth to a baby with a dragon seeking to devour the baby and chasing that woman and her baby out into the wilderness. That’s what’s going on in human history. Satan hates the idea of Jesus Christ and hates those who bear his image. And so humanity is caught in the crossfire. Think about, for instance, when Herod is wanting to destroy Jesus, he winds up killing all of these children while he’s trying to get at him. That’s not unusual, that’s what Satan is doing. He is raging against Christ and against all of Jesus’s brothers and sisters, wanting to destroy them. The very image of Christ is offensive to Satan because it reminds the demonic powers of that warning that God gave to the snake at the very beginning at the fall of humanity. He says, “The seed of the woman will crush your head.” That warning is seen in human nature, and Satan wants to destroy it.

Talk to us a little bit about what you did structurally in the book. I noticed that in all of the sections of the book, you have a couple of introductory chapters, so to speak, where you unpack the seriousness of the temptation and the anatomy of temptation. Then there’s three chapters that deal specifically with the three respective temptations of Christ and then a chapter at the end dealing with how we fight temptation. I noticed throughout the entire book that in each of the sections you took us back to the garden and you took us back to Israel. It modeled for us a hermeneutic of sorts for understanding how to read the Scripture and things like that. Could you talk about that a little bit? Why did you do that, keep referring back to Genesis and referring back to the failures of Israel?

Because I think that’s what Matthew and Luke are doing when they tell us about our Lord’s temptations. Think about where Luke puts the temptation narrative. He gives you the genealogy of Jesus, and it goes all the way back to, “And Adam was the son of God.” And then he takes us into this temptation narrative where the key point is the serpent continually asking Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, then . . .” That’s the point. Jesus in the temptation also keeps going back to Deuteronomy and quoting places in Deuteronomy where Israel is being tempted in the very same ways that he is there. And Israel’s doing what? They’ve been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. Jesus goes out into the wilderness for 40 days and is tempted at every point, except unlike Israel who would fall and unlike Adam who fell, Jesus is triumphant. He turns back the temptation. So Jesus is showing himself to be the real humanity, the new humanity, the new Adam and the people of God, the new Israel. He is obedient where we have fallen and where we have failed.

Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about those three middle chapters. Would you be able to briefly summarize those three temptations? Temptation number one, what was happening there? What was the root temptation? And do that for temptation number two and number three.

The first temptation is the one I think we’re best able to understand because most people understand what it is to really crave something to eat. A few minutes ago before we started, I was really, really wanting a Coke Zero. I just have in my mind, “I really want a Coke Zero.” Someone found one for me. We all know that sensation. Even if we’ve never been truly starving, we know the sensation of wanting something and having the appetite met.

In that temptation, what Satan is doing is attempting to father Jesus. He’s coming to Jesus after God has already announced, “This is My beloved Son, and in him I’m well pleased,” at Jesus’ baptism. Satan comes in and says, “If you are the son of God, then turn these stones into bread.” Now what’s he doing? Jesus has been hungry, He’s been fasting, and he really is genuinely hungry, the text says. When Satan says, “Turn these stones into bread,” what’s he doing? He’s doing the same thing he did with Eve. Satan comes to Eve and says, “Look at this tree. It’s desirable to the eyes. It’s good to eat. God doesn’t want you to have it because he knows that if you eat it you’ll be wise. God is keeping something back from you.”

When Israel is in the wilderness, they don’t have anything to eat, they don’t have anything to drink, and so they immediately say, “God brought us out here into the wilderness to kill us. He’s not really a father to us.” Now, Satan says to Jesus something that Jesus understands. Jesus understands that a father provides for his children. Remember, Jesus says, “How many of you, being evil, if your son came to you and said, ‘Give me bread,’ would give him a stone?” Now, Satan says, “You want bread. Look around you, all there are here are stones. Turn these stones into bread. Feed yourself.”

In reality, what Satan is saying is, “Feed yourself at my direction, which means that I am feeding you. I am a father to you.” So I think what we see in that temptation is that one of the ways that we are being tempted — those temptations that are coming to man — is to be driven by our appetite. We have appetites for all kinds of things. I mean, think about what Satan is saying to Jesus. Is wanting bread a good thing? Yeah, I mean it’s good to eat. Jesus serves us bread in our churches every time we come around the Lord’s table. Jesus tells us that in the world to come we’re going to gather around the table at the marriage supper of the lamb and eat bread. He says, “I’ll eat bread with you there.”

Satan tries to find an appetite that God has created for good and asks us to be governed by that appetite, to be ruled by that appetite. It could be appetite for any number of things — sex, for comfort, for food, for drink, for whatever it is, be governed and ruled by that.

Before we go on, let me just stop. Let’s talk about desire a little bit there as it relates to these things because you just mentioned God gave us these appetites for good. So is the nature of sinful temptation that we have wrong desires? Or is it because they’re inordinate or we desire things too much or we desire the wrong things? How do we channel that? How should we think about our own God-given desires?

The very reason that temptation is strong is because we have desires that God put there for a good purpose. All of those appetites are driving us toward something that is for our good and for the good of humanity as a whole. In other words, we don’t eat strictly rationally. Maybe as contemporary, affluent Americans, relatively speaking in the history of the world, we do more than anybody else in the history of the universe, eat when we want to eat. But ultimately you get hungry. You want to eat.

There’s never been a human culture that said, “We forgot to have sex. We don’t have any children because we never thought about the fact that we were supposed to have sex with one another.” No, there’s a drive and an instinct there that drives you toward this. All of these appetites are good and created for good. What Satan wants to do is to just redirect them from God’s direction towards something else. I mean, think about when God created the man and the woman, He said, “I’ve given you all of these trees with fruit that is good to eat.” He created them with an appetite, and he created fruit that is designed to look good and to taste good. Satan just says, “Turn it away from what God has decreed and get it yourself. Grasp for it yourself.”

So that’s the reason why the desire is so strong. Satan is a plagiarist. He’s not creative. He can only work with human nature as God has designed it. So he finds those common human desires, and he knows how strong they are, and he just turns them in another direction.

In this section of the book, you make a really interesting point. You note that you are not what you desire. You are not what you want. You are who you are. In other words, our appetites don’t really exist for themselves, but they exist for deeper spirituality. What does it mean to recover then a sense of who you are apart from what you want? If identity is a key issue here, how do we recover these misaligned desires?

Well, everybody has the temptation to think, “If this is what I want, then this must define who I am.” I had someone say something like that to me one time. This was a woman who couldn’t control her temper. She had a very sharp tongue, and she would say things to people that would just cut them to shreds. She said, “Well, I know I shouldn’t do that, but that’s just the way I am. That’s the way that my family is. We’ve always been this way. We just tell it like it is.” She’s defining herself according to this desire to let loose of her rage. But that’s not who she is. That is to be controlled by who she is and by her identity. The way that we find that is through the word of God, through the gospel that’s been given to us.

I mean, that’s what’s happening in the temptation. God says to Jesus, “You are my beloved Son, and with you I am well pleased.” That’s where Jesuss identity is. Jesus turns at every point when that’s being questioned and clings to that. And so that’s more important to him, the fact that he is the beloved Son of the Father, which means God is going to feed him. That’s more important to him than the grumbling of his stomach. Whatever your particular appetite is at any given moment, your identity in Christ is more significant and more important than that. And if there is a desire, then God has put that desire there and he has a means to meet that desire in a way that brings glory to him.

You talk about the desert island test as it comes to us evaluating our desires and such. Talk about that a little bit.

One of the things that I’ll say to people is imagine that you’re on a desert island and you have a 24-hour period where you have access to anything. You can immediately summon anything, and no one will ever know that this happened. It will never come up again, not even at judgment. You have 24 hours. What would it be? What would it look like? And you can get some insight into where the wildness is in your own heart by asking that kind of question.

What does that person do? We’ll get into some of the rescue side of things at the end of the conversation. But just briefly on that point, now that we have maybe people jarred and snapped to attention, what happens for the person who says, “Russell, in answering that question, I’m a freak sinner if it comes down to that.” What does that person do?

Well, you’re not a freak. It’s common to man, so you’re not freakish. It may seem freakish, but it is common to man. What you have to do is to say, “What is it that I am wanting, and where is that met in God’s purpose and plan for me?” Sometimes that’s not met in God’s purpose and plan for me until resurrection from the dead. Maybe right now what I’m doing is fighting and struggling against that. But I’m asking, “Where ultimately is God providing this for me?”

And as a Father, he does provide that.

Yes, and you talk about freakishness. A couple of years ago — a year and a half ago or so — I gave my ethics students at Southern Seminary their final exam. I just made up a situation. I said, “Imagine that this woman comes to see you and she says, ‘I want to follow Jesus. I believe he died for me. I believe he was raised from the dead. I want to follow his lordship in whatever way he takes. Here’s my problem: I’m 50 years old, 30 years ago I had gender reassignment surgery. I had a sex change. I was born a man. I have lived for 30 years as a woman. Everybody who knows me knows me as a woman. I adopted a little girl 10 years ago. She only knows me as mom. She knows nothing about this. How do I follow Jesus? Whatever you tell me I’ll do. If that means having more surgery, I’ll have more surgery. If that means living as a man, I’ll live as a man. If that means staying the way I am, whatever it is.’” My question was, “What do you say to her or to him?”

Since then, I’ve heard from a lot of people who are in that situation. One person just a few weeks ago said, “I’ve come to faith in Christ. I’ve been living as a woman even though I was born a man, and I’m trying to live as a man, but I’m completely alienated from what it means to be a man and I’m struggling and I’m fighting.” Well, what I have to say to that person is you’re not what you want. You are who you are. And yes, you’re alienated from what it means to be a man, but every sinner is alienated from what it means to be a person in some way or other. So this is your particular cross to bear. You struggle and you fight against that, but you’re not a freak. We’re all struggling and fighting against our sin nature at various points.

As the writer of Hebrews would say, “You have not yet fought to the shedding of your blood.” That’s the normal Christian life. What that person needs is a church of people who will not view him as a freak, but who will say, “This is where you’re weak and where you’re vulnerable. In Galatians 6, we are going to bear you up at this point as a weaker brother.” But we all are in that place in some place or another.

So the need for us to call one another back and rehearse the good news of the gospel, but to call each other back to our identity in Christ is absolutely essential.

And to say, “This may be very, very long term.” I mean that a former transsexual may never feel like a man until the resurrection from the dead. He may be always grappling with that until the resurrection from the dead. But as the Bible says, this is just a mist. This is just a small blip in time preparing us for something that is much, much longer, infinitely longer.

As it relates to these desires, you had a line from the book where you said that “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is a sham. But instead, with the resurrected Christ we can sing out, “Eat, drink, and be merry for yesterday we were dead.” That’s a powerful, powerful line. And on that note, we’re going to take a brief break.

Let me take you back, before we go into temptation number two and number three, talk a little bit more about the significance of the temptation narrative coming right on the heels of Jesus’s baptism. You note there is a crucial connection in the little word “then” when it comes down to the phrase, “Then Jesus was led into the wilderness.” Talk to us about that.

Well, at the baptism, what does Jesus do? He identifies himself with sinful humanity. John doesn’t want to baptize him. Jesus comes up and says, “I want to be baptized by you,” and John is horribly offended by that. He thinks, “I mean, wait a minute, Jesus, You don’t understand what I’m saying. If you’re being baptized, that means that You’re identifying yourself with these vipers that I’m telling to flee from the wrath to come.” And Jesus says, “You just do what I told you to do and baptize me.”

When he is baptized, the Spirit comes down upon Jesus and the Father announces, “This is My beloved Son, with him I’m well pleased.” And then as he’s publicly marked out and identified as the anointed one of God and Son of God, he then is sent out into the wilderness where that word that God has spoken is then being tested. The word that was heard in the past, Satan is now bringing questions to that. He says, “If you really are the Son of God, then you ought to be able to see it and verify it in your life in these ways.”

We talk sometimes about that passage in terms of maybe inauguration of public ministry and things like that, but you really talk about that also being Jesus marching out into the wild places as the inauguration of this triumph.

I think it’s a pattern that you see. Think about, for instance, when David is anointed as king, oil is put on him and the Spirit comes down upon him. Nobody’s there. You don’t know that David is king. He’s just a shepherd boy out in the pastures with this prophet. The prophet is announcing, “You’re now the king of Israel,” Spirit is now upon him, and what immediately happens? He goes out to meet the enemy, Goliath, the Philistine warrior. Jesus does the same thing. He’s anointed now as king, Spirit visibly coming down upon him, and what’s the first thing that he does? He marches out, outside the camp to meet the enemy of God.

And he goes to do battle on our behalf. Excellent. Well, we’ve talked about temptation number one and revolving really around this issue of desire, cravings, appetites. Talk to us about temptation number two, I think it’s chapter four in the book, but what’s really happening in that second temptation or what we’re calling the second temptation?

Matthew has it second and Luke has it third. This is the one that’s most difficult for people to understand because this is the one where Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and says, “Throw Yourself off of it.” Most of us don’t feel that way. There are some people who have a temptation like that. I’ve talked to a guy one time who said, “When I’m driving down the highway, I just always have this temptation to veer off into oncoming traffic.” He said, “I don’t want to veer into oncoming traffic, I don’t ever do it, but it comes to my mind.” This was a guy I knew 20 years ago or so, and he says, “I struggle with that.”

Most people if you say, “What I’m really tempted to do is to just find a really, really tall building and jump off of it,” it means that person is really disturbed and in need of some help. We don’t identify with it until you realize what it is Satan is really asking Jesus to do. He’s quoting Bible verses to him and says, “If you’re the Son of God, throw yourself off. You will not be allowed to even dash your foot up against a stone.” What’s he asking Jesus to do? Well, really two things, I think. One of them is, “If God is really for you, prove it so that you have something tangible and visible you know that God is really for you.” One of the places where I think that temptation shows up a lot has to do with assurance of salvation.

A lot of people are tortured because they want something they can see to prove that God really loves them, which is one of the reasons why I think some people get so involved in the prosperity gospel stuff. They really think, “I want to see God blessing me, or healing me of cancer, or whatever it is, so that I know that God is really for me. I’m testing him in this.” It’s also the reason why I think some people really want a visible demonstration of salvation. Sometimes you’ll have people who have a card that somebody has signed, which says, “I was there when you prayed to receive Christ. I saw you. You really meant it,” and they had that sincerity that is there.

I remember as a kid grappling with assurance, and I would just pray what we call “the sinner’s prayer” over and over again just to make sure. In case I didn’t say it exactly right the first time, I’m going to say it with more sincerity this time. It’s trying to test God in that security. But then I think there’s another point here. What Satan wants Jesus to do is to prove God’s protection publicly. If Jesus goes off the pinnacle of the temple, that’s a very public place. He is then rescued by angels. He is now demonstrated to be who he says he is. He is protected by God, and God has received him. That’s the temptation that’s going to go all the way through to the very end when Jesus is on the cross and everyone from the criminal being crucified next to him to the crowds in front of him is saying, “If God is really your Father, if you’re really the Christ of God, come down off that cross. Prove it and show it.”

But Jesus doesn’t fall for that. He says, “You’re not going to test the Lord your God.” And he knows that ultimately God is going to vindicate him. But where is he going to vindicate him? At the resurrection from the dead. That’s Romans 1. He’s declared to be the Son of God with power by raising him from the dead.

Back to the first aspect of what you noted there, you wrote in the book, “When our ultimate goal becomes security and protection, God becomes a means to that security and protection.” You say that’s not what the gospel is all about. Christ is not some quantifiable spiritual asset that we can check on occasion like we would a bank account. Unpack that for us a bit.

I think that’s one of the reasons why sometimes in our preaching and teaching on hell we can actually further this temptation. We ought to be preaching and teaching on hell, Jesus does and the apostles do. But sometimes we can present the gospel as, “Here is hell, this is so awful, and you don’t want to go there. Jesus is the means by which you don’t go to hell.” When in reality, somebody could say, “I don’t want to go to hell, and I know that God is powerful enough to send me to hell. I think God is wrong, but he could do it, so I’m going to submit to what he demands, which is Christ.”

That’s not salvation. That’s not repentance of sin. Jesus isn’t just a means to deliver us from judgment. The goal of the gospel is Jesus Christ. As John Piper says, “God is the gospel.” God in Christ is the gospel.” So you’re not just tolerating Jesus in order to get to what you want, which is an ongoing existence like you have now except freed from all the things you don’t want — disease and hardship and whatever. No, you want Christ. That’s what the gospel is.

To that second point that you deal with in this section of the book and this second temptation is this issue of vindication. I thought you had a really excellent section on the temptation that we have of being right, of wanting to be justified, of wanting to be vindicated. I thought this was interesting. You note that the public display of being in the right is called vindication, and you note that it’s crucially related to something the Bible calls “glory.” What’s the connection that’s going on there between the public display of being right and glory?

Well, glory in Scripture is that public affirmation. This is one of the reasons why John says in John 12 that the reason the religious leaders did not like Jesus and the reason that some people who believed the word that he was saying but they wouldn’t follow him, they’re afraid they would be put out of the synagogues, is because they loved the glory that comes from man rather than the glory that comes from God. They loved the affirmation and the approval that comes from man rather than the affirmation and approval that comes from God.

I find myself in that situation a lot, and most often on issues that I am right about or that I think I’m right about. I may be wrong about it, but I think I’m right about it. Because the real issue for me is that I want to be right. We live in a culture that furthers that. You define yourself by your sports team. You get into arguments with people about which team is better, and you identify yourself vicariously with this team on the field even though you don’t have a thing to do with how well they’re performing or not. But that becomes part of you. We’re in Minneapolis right now, and Brett Favre, who played here for the Vikings, is from my part of the world. He lived just not far down the road from me. And sometimes when I would hear people criticizing Brett Favre, I would hear them criticizing my people and my hometown. And if they’re criticizing my hometown, well, they’re criticizing me, and I’m not going to stand for that. There’s something that is in us that wants to do that. Or you identify yourself with your political position, you’re a Democrat or Republican or whatever it is you are, and you want to be right, and you want to argue for that.

We can do the same thing with what we believe about God, and often I have found myself in that situation. I think I talk about this in the book. As a really young man, I went once to a convention of very liberal Christians with whom I disagree and disagree to this day on issues of biblical authority, on the nature of salvation, and those kinds of things. But I went in there and I was writing articles about what was going on. I realize as I look back that even though I was telling the truth about what was happening in the liberal positions theologically that this group was taking, I was trying to catch them. It was a gotcha journalism moment. I wanted to say, “Aha. See, they’re wrong, and by implication, I’m right in this.”

Now, I’m not saying that there’s not a time for people to do that, and we clearly are called to call out errors, but that was a dangerous place for me to be because I was turning into an accuser. My heart wasn’t breaking when I saw people denying the truthfulness of Scripture. I wasn’t seeking to bring them to repentance, I was seeking to expose them. And that’s Satanic. That’s what Satan does. He’s the accuser. Christianity means redemption, but if you want to see yourself as in the right, then you’re going to be in an ongoing fight and argument. Jesus never is. That’s the reason why Jesus says to Peter, “We’re not going to fight here. We’re not going to turn back these crowds trying to arrest me. We’re going to go to the cross.” That’s the way of Christ.

And the cross is our glory. When it comes to boasting, we have that to boast in. Let’s talk about the third temptation now. What’s happening there? What is the temptation, and then what are some of the implications of it? How does Christ resist that temptation?

The Bible tells us that Satan shows Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he says, “I have been given authority over all of these kingdoms,” which of course is true in one sense. He’s usurped authority because he’s taken humanity as his prey in temptation at the very beginning of history, so he is now “the ruler of this world.” Paul calls him “the god of this age.” He says, “I will give You all of these things if you will bow down and worship me.” And Jesus says, “You’ll worship the Lord your God and him alone.” Again, he is quoting from Deuteronomy. So he’s taking Jesus’ desire for kingship, which again is a good thing — his desire for glory and his desire to be universal ruler. Those are all very good things, but he says, “I’ll give them to you rather than your Father.”

If you think of that first temptation as a provision, a father provides. That second temptation is protection, a father protects. Then that third temptation is inheritance, “I’ll give you your future.” People in other parts of the world understand inheritance, but we don’t think of it very much because we think an inheritance is something that trust fund kids get from their rich parents. But in the ancient world, in the Middle Eastern world, an inheritance was what you lived by. In other words, when Jesus went and called his disciples off of those fishing boats, James and John, when they leave their father and they leave their nets, they’re not just going to do something else for a while. They’re leaving their inheritance. That’s the engine of their future survival for their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They’re completely walking away from their future. Satan says, “I’ll give you an inheritance. I’ll be your father by giving you the kingdom that has been promised to you all throughout those Old Testament Scriptures. Just bow down and worship me.”

Why would Satan have been willing to give up all of his earthly reign in exchange for worship of Jesus?

That’s something that really struck me as I was praying through this and meditating on this. Satan was willing for Jesus to rule all of the kingdoms of the world. Satan knows what Jesus is about, so he knows this means you’re going to have a world in which you don’t have war, you don’t have torture, you don’t have pornography, you don’t have abortion, you don’t have prostitutes. All of those things are gone because Jesus is ruler. But what’s missing? The cross. Jesus is now no longer a sinless, sacrificial offering. Jesus is ruler, he has the crown, but he does not have the cross. Satan is willing to give up the direction of the world as long as he can continue to hold the world in accusation. And that really ought to inform something about the way that we as Christians try to interface and react to the world around us.

It was in that same section that you note that in all three temptations — and I’ll quote from the book — “Satan was not just trying to tempt Jesus, he was attempting to adopt Jesus. Satan didn’t just want to be Jesus’s Lord, he wanted to be his father.” That hit me in a really powerful way as it relates to our daily battles with temptation. Scripture says, “You are of your father, the devil,” and we have now a heavenly Father because we are in Christ. And then adoption comes up again. I just wonder if you could probe that a little bit more for us. Satan would give it all up in order to be Jesus’s father, as it were. What’s going on there?

I think that whenever we’re being tempted, what we have to pierce through and see is that there’s always that implication there that says, “God really doesn’t have your best interest at heart.” It’s like the Garden of Eden or Israel. It says, “God really isn’t going to give you what is good for you, and so instead you’ve got to fight for it. You’ve got to grab it in some way because God just isn’t going to give it to you.” I think there’s always that sense where if we don’t really, really pay attention to wisdom, we can fall into that trap. I remember one time hearing someone give a testimony, and it was one of these really dramatic testimonies that we as evangelical Christians like to put forward. He was talking about this really, really wild life and then he came to Christ and then everything in his life started going well. I remember thinking, “Wow, he’s had it all.”

I actually envied that testimony because he had all of the wild pleasures from before and yet Christianity and the life to come. How wicked and satanic that is that I would think somehow I am missing out on something because there’s an absence of whatever this particular twistedness was of following after one’s own way. There’s always that temptation. Whatever we’re being drawn toward, if it’s “I want to build my own kingdom, exalt myself,” or whatever it is that I’m being drawn toward, I’ve got to do it for myself because God is not going to do it for me. That’s always back there. Whereas the gospel keeps saying to us, “What you want is good. Do you want to be exalted? Do you want to be glorified? But you want to be exalted and glorified by God. And how are you exalted and glorified by God? By humbling yourself, by becoming a servant of all, by washing feet. Those who are faithful in those small things then become given charge over many things.”

And it’s your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. So there is an inheritance that is awaiting for those who overcome. Let me move now to the last section of the book, which is really on the subject of “now what?” Having looked at how our elder brother has conquered on our behalf, how in him we are God’s beloved son in whom he is well pleased — staggering thoughts in and of themselves, let alone when we start to employ that in our sanctification. These are the nuggets that are hidden in this book. They translate really well immediately into our lives. Let’s talk about resisting temptation, fighting temptation, and warring against that. And to jump back to something earlier you say in the book, and it’s this: you note the dangers of on the one hand overestimating the power of temptation, and you note the dangers of underestimating the power of temptation. Talk about that.

I think you can overestimate temptation by saying, “I’m just predestined to this.” That woman I talked about earlier said, “I’m just the kind of person who is going to lose my temper and rage.” Or I talked to a young woman one time who said to me, “Look, my father committed suicide. He struggled with depression. I struggle with depression. I know that I’m going to wind up exactly where he did, hanging from a rope.” No, you are not that destiny that is there. So sometimes you can overestimate temptation and say, “There’s no way that I can be free from this,” when the Bible tells you the opposite. It says there is always a way of escape. Now, it does not say there’s a way of escape from being tempted. It says there’s a way to escape from falling to temptation and sinning. One of the things I think we want is to be free from temptation, not necessarily to be free from sin.

So sometimes when people aren’t freed from the temptation, then they think, “Well, then I must be destined for the sin.” Somebody, for instance, who has come out of a background of drunkenness may think, “Because I am longing for another drink, that must mean that I am a drunk and that I am going to ultimately fall back into drunkenness. I’m not going to be able to fight it.” No, no, no, there’s a way of escape. But then I think we can also underestimate temptation. Because those desires are so strong, you get yourself out to a point at which you are less and less able to grapple and to fight against temptation. And so we’ve got to understand the power of it, but also its limitations.

You write, “Don’t mistake the stillness of your conscience for freedom of temptation.” You also cite this issue of prayerlessness as being somewhat of a barometer of how we’re doing, whether we’re actually succumbing to a pattern of sinful temptation or whether we’re fighting against it. Talk about how prayerlessness is an indicator of what’s going on there.

From the very beginning, you remember when our first parents fell, when they sinned against God, what did they immediately do? They hid. They heard God coming into the presence of the garden and they hid in the vegetation. That’s always what sinners do. We hide from God. So if you find yourself moving into a time of sustained prayerlessness, you ought to ask, “Why? What am I hiding from?” And sometimes it’s because you have people who are holding onto a sin and they don’t want to let go of those sins, and so they want to hide from God so they’re not convicted of it. Sometimes though, it’s people who are being accused by Satan and they believe the accusation, and so somehow they believe that God doesn’t approve of them.

For instance, I knew a woman one time who had had an abortion before she came to know the Lord Jesus. She had this mindset every time that she would pray that God was looking at her thinking, “Yeah, I know you. You’re the woman who had the abortion. You ought to be in hell, but you found Jesus, so come on in. You met the obligations of the rules, so I’m going to let you in.” It’s not the way God views her. God doesn’t view her that way. God views her as hidden in Christ, so he is rejoicing over her. The Bible says he is singing over her. He thinks of her exactly what he thinks of Jesus. And so that ought to free us then to, as the Bible says, to come boldly to the throne of grace, not because we have any reason to approach the throne of grace, but because Jesus does. He is beloved by the Father and received by the Father, and we are hidden in him. So we have the same access.

As it relates to our fighting against sin and wrestling with temptation, what does it mean for Jesus to sympathize with us in our temptations (Hebrews 4:15)?

I think sometimes people read that as merely psychological. So Jesus is saying, “I know, I’ve been there, brother. I know. I know what you’re talking about. I know it’s hard.” And sometimes that’s the kind of sympathy we want because when we do something, we want to call somebody up and say, “Hey, you won’t believe what I just did.” They say, “Oh, I know I’ve been there. I know how it is.”

I’ve been in a few men’s meetings like that.

Sure. But that’s not what Jesus is doing. How is he sympathizing with us? The writer of Hebrew says it’s as our high priest. So it’s literally that he is feeling alongside us. It’s compassion. It’s that passion and that feeling that is with us. So Jesus joins us in that, and because we are united to Christ, as the Scripture says, he’s the head of the body. So the energy is coming from the head down into the body and we are empowered by the head to now operate with him and to operate in concert with him. The sympathy is not simply Jesus saying, “I understand,” it’s Jesus joining us in the middle of temptation and overcoming with us. So when we overcome temptation by the Spirit, Jesus is continuing to overcome because we’re overcoming through his power.

You write this: “Resistance to temptation means taking desire seriously.” And here at Desiring God, we take desire pretty seriously, especially as it relates to seeking and obtaining the highest pleasure that can be afforded us, namely that which is found in God. You talk about the need for us to move beyond viewing sin as merely wrong and viewing sin and temptation as ugly, for what it is. I hear some echoes of Thomas Chalmers in that, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. We talk around here at times about the superior pleasures of Christ to the inferior pleasures of sin. How does one get a mindset that views sin as ugly as an inferior pleasure?

I think it means cultivating what Russell Kirk used to call the “moral imagination,” which means it’s not just that you have intellectual categories — these things are right and these things are wrong. It certainly doesn’t mean that you just have rules and regulations, these are the things we do and these are the things that we don’t do. Instead, you learn to see things as they are. So when you see things as they are, you start to have an intuitive revulsion in the way that the Spirit does toward those things that are anti-Christ, and you start being cultivated to love those things for which you’ve been designed and for which you will have in the world to come. It takes a while to begin cultivating those new desires because we’re coming out of an encampment under the enemy’s power in which we’ve been trained in the other direction. We’re having to come out of that, so it takes a long time. That’s part of what God’s discipline of us in Christ is about. It’s to reshape and to refocus those desires.

To have our “wanter” changed, ss it were, to have wrong affections replaced with true holy religious affections, is that a miracle, a repeated miracle that God does in the soul of the believer?

It is a miracle, but I think sometimes people have expectations there that are too high. In other words, sometimes I think people are being transformed in their desires, but they don’t know it. Sometimes you’ll have people that God instantly frees them from something, that drug addict who is saved and instantly he no longer wants drugs anymore. He’s freed from it. He doesn’t have the desire. He doesn’t want it. He says, “I’ve never had another desire for it.” Praise God for that. But I worry when we have testimonies like that being given that everyone else is thinking this is the normal pattern of what God does. That’s not necessarily the normal pattern of what God does. That drug addict may be struggling and fighting against those desires even as God is cultivating these other desires, keeping him from this while he is wrestling. It’s hard for us to see in the middle of sanctification where we are in the sanctification process. All we know is ourselves. And so we sometimes expect too much and therefore we don’t glorify God for what he’s doing — that slow, laborious process of making us like Christ.

You make the statement that “gospel freedom is the most important aspect of resisting temptation.” What do you mean by that?

I mean that temptation is not simply about rules and regulations. I mean temptation is ultimately about asking, “Who am I in Christ? What does it mean that Jesus died for me? And what does it mean that Jesus was raised from the dead for me? Who am I in this, and what does this mean for me ultimately in my future?” so that these other things now are relativized by that. “I’m able,” the writer of Hebrew says, “to struggle to the shedding of my own blood because I know what it is that Jesus has for me ultimately.” I think that has to be the most important thing, is that preaching and teaching of the gospel all the time to oneself.

As we move toward a close here, I want you to speak more directly to someone who might be watching this interview. Speak to the person whose sinful strongholds and besetting sin has entangled their feet for so long. They are really at a point of despair that they will frankly never get victory over this sin. Or speak to the person, as we alluded to earlier, who feels like their temptations are so freakishly bizarre that they could never go public in even acknowledging they’re tempted toward that. Or speak to the person who is just in the midst of a season of trial and temptation where they feel like God has left them alone in the wild place, that he’s put them there and isn’t there with them. Speak to any of those folks tonight. What do you say to that person who tonight is one of those types of people?

The last person that you mentioned, I would say, when Jesus is 40 days in the wilderness, God is not seen in that narrative. God is speaking, of course, there at the baptism and God is going to speak to Jesus later on, but we don’t see God in those 40 days. But we know, according to the word of God, the Spirit has driven him there and God is present with him. You don’t have to feel God’s presence in order for God to be present in your life. As a matter of fact, those are often the moments when God is the most present to us, when we don’t feel as though he’s here with us.

To the other people that you mentioned, I think what is most important is, first, exposure of whatever it is that you’re entangled by. That’s counterintuitive because we want to protect ourselves and the satanic powers want us to protect ourselves and to keep it hidden when the freedom that we find comes by ripping the cover off of it, bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. For instance, you may have a man who is involved in internet pornography. He may say, “Well, I’m going to stop doing this.” And of course, everybody who’s involved in internet pornography or any other kind of pornography thinks, “I can just say it’s over and it’s going to be over and because I feel really badly about it’s not going to happen again.” And it does. What he needs to do is to expose this sin, to say to his wife, to the elders of his church, “This is where I am enslaved, and this is where I am captive.”

The same thing would apply to somebody who is in love with wealth or someone who is entangled with some other besetting sin. Expose that and then allow the body of Christ to work with you in vulnerability so that you are subverting the places where you are weak. You remember those old werewolf movies when the guy knows he’s a werewolf and he knows when the full moon comes out he’s going to turn into this raging monster. And so what does he do? He locks himself down in the basement and puts chains on, and he says to everybody, “When you hear me, do not let me out.” What’s he doing? He knows the danger and he is taking action to hold himself back.

Well, that’s what all of us are doing. We find out where our weak points are and we say, “I’m protecting myself from that area of vulnerability where I’m going to fall.” That usually means bringing other people in to say, “I want you to watch me in this.” So that person who has a temptation toward pride or self exaltation, he needs to have people in his life who are willing to say, “Hey, Ronnie, you’re exalting yourself. You’re being prideful.” And you speak the truth to him in that way. We all have to have that.

I’d like to just close tonight by reading a paragraph that you wrote, and I thought it was one of the standout summary paragraphs of what’s happening in this book. You say this:

Jesus overcame temptation because He consistently believed God’s word about him, “You are my beloved Son,” even when he walked in the wild places. Because there was no sin in him, his communion with his Father was unbroken. The gospel reminds you continually that you are found in Christ, that the Christ life is being lived out in you through the Spirit and that the Father is therefore pleased with you. The more you look to Christ, the less you hide.

Thank you for writing that paragraph and thank you for writing this book. It’s been a pleasure talking about it.

Thank you, Scott. It’s been good to be with you.