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Tempted and Tried

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
208 Seiten
Englisch
Crosswayerschienen am02.03.2011
Although temptation is a common and well-acknowledged part of the human experience, few realize the truth behind temptation and fewer still know how to defeat it. Tempted and Tried will not reassure Christians by claiming that temptation is less powerful or less prevalent than it is; instead, it will prepare believers for battle by telling the truth about the cosmic war that is raging. Moore shows that the temptation of every Christian is part of a broader conspiracy against God, a conspiracy that confronts everyone who shares the flesh of Jesus through human birth and especially confronts those who share the Spirit of Christ through the new birth of redemption. Moore walks readers through the Devil's ancient strategies for temptation revealed in Jesus' wilderness testing. Moore considers how those strategies might appear in a contemporary context and points readers to a way of escape. Tempted and Tried will remind Christians that temptation must be understood in terms of warfare, encouraging them with the truth that victory has already been secured through the triumph of Christ.

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.mehr
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E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
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Produkt

KlappentextAlthough temptation is a common and well-acknowledged part of the human experience, few realize the truth behind temptation and fewer still know how to defeat it. Tempted and Tried will not reassure Christians by claiming that temptation is less powerful or less prevalent than it is; instead, it will prepare believers for battle by telling the truth about the cosmic war that is raging. Moore shows that the temptation of every Christian is part of a broader conspiracy against God, a conspiracy that confronts everyone who shares the flesh of Jesus through human birth and especially confronts those who share the Spirit of Christ through the new birth of redemption. Moore walks readers through the Devil's ancient strategies for temptation revealed in Jesus' wilderness testing. Moore considers how those strategies might appear in a contemporary context and points readers to a way of escape. Tempted and Tried will remind Christians that temptation must be understood in terms of warfare, encouraging them with the truth that victory has already been secured through the triumph of Christ.

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781433515972
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2011
Erscheinungsdatum02.03.2011
Seiten208 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1609 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14345790
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

1
WRESTLING WITH DEMONS
Why Temptation Matters

So there I was, standing in a hotel lobby with a strange woman, a throbbing heartbeat, and a guilty conscience. In most ways it wasn´t nearly as bad as it looks typed out on this page. But in lots of ways it was even worse. I didn´t really do anything wrong-and certainly didn´t set out to do anything wrong. But that was just the problem. Before I knew it, I was scared at how mindless I was about the whole scenario.

I´d gotten here kind of accidentally. My family and I were driving-through the state of Tennessee, I think-when one of those sudden rainstorms had emerged, the kind that brings the slick grime right up to the surface of the road and mucks up the windshield with smearing drops the wipers can´t seem to keep up with. Even though we hadn´t gotten nearly as far as I´d hoped, the rain just wasn´t letting up. I pulled the minivan off the highway and left my family in the vehicle while I ran in to check for a vacancy in a chain hotel whose sign we´d seen through the storm.

I waited in line at the front desk. I was exhausted and irritated, mostly because of the rain and the almost Hindu-like mantra coming from the backseat- Dad, he´s hitting me -repeated over and over and over again. My thoughts were clicking around as I waited to check us in, moving from sermon ideas to budget numbers to parenting strategies.

The clerk, a young woman, gave an artificial pout and then a wink and a half smile, indicating she could tell it´d been a trying day. Well, hey there, she said, and as soon as she said it I noticed she reminded me of a friend I´d known back in college. She had dimples in her cheeks, I think, and she tossed her hair back, holding it there in her hand for a minute as she checked on whether two adjoining rooms, one for my wife and me and one for the kids, would be available that night. When she called me by my first name, I felt a little jump in my stomach-like the feeling you get in the split second when the roller coaster creaks to the top of the pinnacle, just before you can see the drop in front of you. I started to ask, How do you know my name? before I realized she was reading my credit card.

As this woman waited for the credit card machine to rattle out my receipt and punch out my automated key, we talked about the rain outside and about how traffic was bad because of the ball game at the high school stadium down the road. She laughed at my little quips. She teased me about my soaking wet hair from running through the stormy weather. I felt like I was in college again, or maybe even in high school. I didn´t have to judge between disputes over who had whose toys or explain how predestination and free will work together in the Bible. I didn´t have to pay a mortgage or tell a faculty member he couldn´t have a raise. And I liked it.

Just then I heard a word I never thought would terrify me, but it did, just that once. I heard Daddy. And then I heard it again. Daddy! my three-year-old son Samuel cried out as he rode through the lobby in the luggage cart being pushed by his two older brothers. Look at me!

I did look at him and wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead as I realized I had completely forgotten that my family was waiting outside for me in the van. As I signed the credit card form, I noticed that my voice and body language toward the clerk had suddenly become a good bit more businesslike.

I felt as if I´d been caught doing something wrong, and it rattled me. As I pushed the luggage cart onto the elevator ( Benjamin, don´t swing from that ; No, Timothy, you can´t have that 40-ounce Full Throttle energy drink from the vending machine ), I mentally reassured myself that everything was okay. I hadn´t done anything; not even close. But for some reason I had paid attention to that woman, and worse, I hadn´t noticed myself paying attention to her until my kids interrupted me.

Now on the one hand nothing happened. I hadn´t-to use the biblical language for it- lusted in my heart for her. I´d just engaged in a minute of conversation. I´m afraid you´ll think of me as some kind of leering, pervertlike preacher when, although I don´t know all my own weaknesses, I don´t think I´m particularly vulnerable at this point. I don´t check women out as they pass by (and I roll my eyes when I see other men who do). Moreover, this woman´s interest in me was nil. If she read about this, she would, I´m quite sure, not remember it. And if she did remember it, she would probably say, You mean that little guy who looks like a cricket? Well, bless his heart.

But it scared me. I was scared not by what actually happened but by a glimpse into what could have happened. What if I hadn´t been on a road trip with my family but on a business trip alone, as I often am? What if she´d been interested in me? For a moment, just a moment, I´d forgotten who I was, who I am. Husband. Pastor. Son. Christian. Daddy. I was struck by the thought, It starts like this, doesn´t it? It starts as a series of innocent departures, gradually leading to something more and something more. What scares me even more is to wonder how many of those situations have happened in my life when I never had the clarifying moment of waking up to the horror around me. It scared me to think of how something like this could so seemingly naturally happen. What if I wasn´t just accidentally winding up there in that hotel lobby at that exact point of exhaustion and irritability? What if I was being led?

A friend of mine heard me talk about my hotel lobby scare and pointed me to an older man in the faith who had written of a strikingly similar situation, also with his child, several years before at a restaurant. After that I´ve found scores of men and women who have had similar moments of terror at looking behind the veil of their own temptations. My story was not unique, and neither is yours. There´s something wild out there, and something wild in here.

The Bible locates this wildness in the universal tragedy of Eden, a tragedy the Spirit locates squarely in our own psyche as well as in history. Sure enough, the canon of Scripture shows us tracks of blood from the very edge of Eden outward. The biblical story immediately veers from Paradise to depictions of murder, drunkenness, incest, gang rape, polygamy, and on and on and on, right down to whatever´s going on with you. But between our cosmic story and your personal story, there´s Israel´s story, holding the two together.

After Eden, God unveiled some hope through the calling of a man he named Abraham, the father of many nations (Rom. 4:17). It was through this man´s line, the ancient oracles said, that God would bless all of the nations, that he´d restore the kingdom to the earth.

This all seemed to be on the verge of happening when God rescued Abraham´s descendants, dramatically and publicly, from their tyranny by the Egyptian state. But then, just as tragically as in Eden, something happened in the desert. The kingdom of priests turned out to be not as far away from the enemy as they´d thought. There was wildness in the wilderness, still.

God called a series of warrior-kings, men of great renown who would fight enemies and hold back the wild. But, again, these kings also succumbed to the wildness inside themselves-to sexual anarchy, egoism, materialism, occultism-and the kingdom collapsed, again, to the wildness outside.

Then, in the fullness of time, Jesus arrived, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God. In three of the four Gospel accounts in the New Testament, we´re told of a strange experience at the beginning of Jesus´ public mission in which Jesus was led by the Spirit to be tempted by the Devil (Matt. 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-13). He was away from his family and followers, out in a desert place in Judea; literally, he was in the wilderness or the wild places.

He went out there to meet his ancestors´ ancient foe-and ours-and to undo what had been done. If you will ever see the kingdom of God, it will be because of what happened under that desert moon, where the kingdoms approached each other, surveyed each other, and, long time coming, attacked each other.

Somehow the evil spirit of Eden appeared to Jesus. Poets and artists have speculated for centuries on what this must have looked or felt like. Did Jesus, like Eve before him, see the figure of a snake out there in the desert? Did Satan appear, as the apostle Paul warned us he could, as a glorious angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14)? Did he appear, as some icons and paintings depict, as a hideous goatlike monster bearing a tantalizing morsel in his hoof? Or did the Devil manifest himself, as he most often does to us, invisibly but with the painfully personal suggestiveness that disguises itself as one´s own thoughts? The Gospels don´t tell us. They simply tell us the Devil was there, and he was not silent.

Almost every world religion-and almost every backwater cult-has sensed that there are spiritual beings out there in the universe, including evil superintelligent beings that mean us harm. The gospel of Jesus Christ directly confronts this dark reality-in a way that often makes us contemporary Western people squirm.

In the beginning pages of Scripture, we are introduced to a cryptic ...
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Autor

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.