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Overcoming Temptations

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No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

1 Corinthians 10:13

The first step in overcoming temptations is to know God will not let us be tempted beyond what we can bear, and he will provide and escape. It’s our task to search for the escape through prayer, and when tempted we immediately capture the thought and exercise the escape. It’s critical to immediately capture the thought before the emotions cause the temptation to be conceived in our minds.

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5) We fight with an attitude of victory and we call on the Lord to be with us to add his power to the scriptures we use to escape the sinful thought.  This way we fight sinful temptations with the power of the Word and with the power of God.

For the Lord your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory. (Deuteronomy) 20:4)  We find scriptures that gives power to overcome and call on the Lord to fight off the sinful thought from Satan or from our fleshy desires.  It is important we train ourselves to respond quickly to a sinful thought because it can quickly be conceived in our minds. Then the evil desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully matured, brings forth death. (James 1:15) We must demolish the thought before it is conceived in our minds.

The problem is that sometimes we have a strong desire to sin that stops our escape. The way we overcome this is by calling the Lord to kill the desire, and we think about how we feel after giving Satan power over us, and we also think about how giving in to our sinful fleshly desire is stronger than our love for God. Therefore, we must prepare ourselves for battle and override our emotions, because Satan will use our emotions to cause us to sin. The battle is between our fleshly desire verses our Spiritual desire, and our emotions can be the deciding factor.

The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8:6) Overcoming our fleshly desire can be difficult until we find and escape in our minds to kill the sinful desire.  Image yielding to your fleshly desire, and your Christian friends are with you, then remember that the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son are with you.

Today plan your escape when known temptations occur.  Develop a mind of hatred for the sinful temptations, and think of victory of overcoming Satan and his demons.  God has given you that power, use it.

Prayer: Lord give me power to overcome my sinful fleshly desires and give me strong scriptural power and your power through the Holy Spirit power of the flesh.  In Jesus name, Amen