Temptation and Jesus - According to CS Lewis

James chapter one starts right off with "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials..." then goes right into temptation. He is definitely making a link between trials (which come from God) and temptation (which comes from the devil). I think they are two sides of a coin. God sends a trial to cause you to grow or to test what He is teaching you and the devil tempts you with a way out of it.



So with these thoughts in mind, when I heard a CS Lewis quote this weekend, it was one of those moments when God hits you with something in multiple ways. I had never looked at Jesus temptations in this way. I know Jesus was tempted, famously by the devil at the start of His ministry, but I never thought of Him having constant temptations like we all do. Besides, He was God, it must have been fairly easy for Him to resist. Right? Anyway, here's the quote. It's very interesting.



“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why “bad” people know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always given in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”