The Cycle That Must Be Broken

Now that I'm an engaged man, life has changed. And one of those changes, all the married men are laughing because they know that it hasn't changed for me. Life is still pretty good actually before, you know, being married. So that's a joke. That's a joke.

But because I'm an engaged man and because I'm working towards the wedding day, I've had to decide that I need to work off my pre-dad bod in order to get into my suit. So my New Year's resolution is to get fit again and to start eating healthier again. One of those changes has been to my breakfast habits, which now has been turned back to eating Weet-Bix. Weet-Bix. And staring down this morning at my three Weet-Bix, I realised this one thing: that you could have Weet-Bix in your pantry for a whole year, probably from the time you made your previous New Year's resolutions to eat better.

You could have it in your pantry for a whole year, eating year-old Weet-Bix past its due-by date, and still not know that it has gone off. It is so bland, so tasteless, so dry, so healthy tasting that you would never know it's gone off. Now I realise that this is a great metaphor for the Christian life. In so many ways, we are tempted by the sugar hits, and we forget the seemingly bland, boring, day-to-day reality of what it means to be a Christian. As Christians today, I think more so than in my time before, so easily we are distracted by secondary purposes, purposes that we mistakenly believe are the main pursuit of the Christian life.

We become fixated on politics, and I'm one of them. We become fixated on controversies in the church. We become fixated on bad theologies from other Christian denominations. We can even become unhelpfully fixated on unconverted friends and family members around us. When really all along we have Weet-Bix to eat.

What is a Christian's Weet-Bix? It is to conquer the power of sin in us. John Owen, the Puritan theologian and pastor, once said that there are two main problems that a pastor must always deal with in their ministry. Just two. I feel like I've got so many spinning plates as a pastor.

He says there are just two that I need to focus on. First, the first partial problem is of the unconverted. Those who need to be persuaded that they are under the dominion of sin. And the second partial problem is persuading those who are no longer under the dominion of sin that they are no longer under the dominion of sin. That's what we're going to be exploring this morning.

And we're gonna have a good dose of Weet-Bix by turning to James chapter one. The letter of James chapter one, and we're gonna read from verse 12 to verse 18. This is the wisdom from the apostle James. Blessed is the man or woman who remains steadfast under trial. For when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of His own will, He brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures. So far, our reading. The title of this morning's talk is the cycle that must be broken.

And from our passage, there are three things that the apostle James wants us to do. Three things that really amount to one thing, and that is to resist and conquer sin. If you've been a Christian for longer than five minutes, you know that that is easier said than done. But far from telling us what we should do and leaving us now to our own devices, James is giving us three powerful truths, at least three, that we need to understand in this passage in order to resist temptation. The first and most obvious one that James makes in the first verses, verses 13 to 14 especially, is that we must accept responsibility for our own sin.

James writes, verse 13, let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. The apostle James is not blind to the fact that Satan is a tempter. Later in chapter four, in fact, he famously writes this verse: resist the devil and he will flee from you.

But here in this passage, he's not concerned about that particular dimension of temptation. What he's focusing his attention on is this: that when we are lured by temptation, sin finds fertile soil because there is a remainder of sinful brokenness in each one of us. When we are tempted, sin finds fertile soil. For some Christians, I dare say in many charismatic circles in particular, but also in many evangelical churches, there is a dualistic, and then I think an unbiblical understanding of temptation and sin. They believe, the Bible tells us, that reality is God versus Satan.

God versus Satan. That everything bad in and around us can only ever come from Satan. Every sinful thought, therefore, every sinful action has come directly by his whispers in our ears, by his machinations and his schemes. But passages like James tells us something differently. We are enticed by our own desire.

What this means is that we can't blame Satan alone. And when we do that, when we do blame Satan, we actually lessen our responsibility. We remove the responsibility of our own poor choices and decisions. The pain that we cause, the destruction we reap by pointing the finger to Satan and saying, he's the one that helped me do it. James crushes that theological perspective, and something even more sinister than that, a theology that may say, God is the one that made me do it.

God is the one who tempted me. Against this extreme view, James tells us, when we are tempted, let us never say, I am being tempted by God. For God is not tempted with sin, nor does He tempt us with it. Against the theology that says our falling into temptations can only come from Satan or worse from God, James makes this point: temptation to sin is connected with the weakness of my own heart. And as long as I'm deceived about that, as long as I don't see that crystal clear, I will continue to fall into sin.

I will continue to fail to deal with it. That's why James finishes the statement in verse 16 by saying, do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Don't be deceived. The warning is that we cannot go through our Christian life pretending that the sins of our own heart, even the most hidden and protected ones, that they can be blamed on anything or anyone else. No, says the apostle.

My beloved brothers and sisters, understand that when you are tempted, you are tempted because of what remains in your own heart, the ongoing, the lingering attraction towards sin. That's the first thing. Don't deny it. Call it what it is. Own it for yourself.

That's the first point. We must accept responsibility for our own sins. Secondly, temptation works in a cycle. Once I recognise that there is a lingering attraction to sin in my heart, I not only need to learn to accept responsibility for it, but I need to learn to understand that there is a cycle involved in my falling into sin. One of the most helpful things that James points out to us in this passage is that there is a pattern, that there is a cycle between temptation and sin.

In reality, I don't think many of us are even aware that a cycle exists. But once you understand this passage, you can start to spot it, and it is, I tell you, the most helpful thing. There is a discernible pattern of falling into temptation, and he outlines it for us in verses fourteen and fifteen. This is what he says. Have a look.

Verse 14: but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death. So what we're seeing here is a process. We're seeing a cycle, don't we?

And this is how it starts. Temptation arises when a person is enticed by desire. The Bible has a lot to say about desires, especially about desiring good things. Set your mind on the things above, on things that are good and true and beautiful, reflect on these things.

The Bible is not shy and is very conscious that desire can also become a false attraction. Our deepest passions can be hijacked to become enticement into things that are evil. There are plenty of examples, aren't there, in the Bible, of people, stories in the Bible, where people have fallen into this cycle, and they are really helpful to go and investigate. But perhaps the greatest paradigm of temptation is also the oldest one, and it goes all the way back to our ancestors, Adam and Eve. A great snapshot of the cycle of temptation.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan, in the form of the serpent, engages Eve in conversation. And as they talk, he directs Eve's eyes to the tree that offers her power to open her eyes, to know what is good and what is evil. The Bible says that Eve finds that the fruit of the tree is a delight to the eyes, it says. A delight to the eyes. Now there's plenty of debate whether it is because the fruit itself looked delicious, it was a really shiny apple, or because it held a curious power that she's inquisitive about.

But something in this fruit is a delight for her eyes. But here is the problem: no longer is the tree viewed in terms of what God has said about it. It is now viewed in terms of what Eve wants from it. In that moment, she is being enticed by desire, and she will eventually give into it, as we know. That's the first step of temptation that the apostle James is talking about here. A desire in us to depart from God's will, to fulfil some deep hunger in us, to go another way.

Once this desire is entertained, James says a second thing happens. We see it in the first half of verse 15. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin. Now there's a really, I think, helpful distinction that's being made here. And it helps all of us who wrestle with feelings of guilt, when we have feelings of guilt very quickly, especially. Being tempted, being enticed, is different to sinning.

Being tempted is different to sinning. See how the process starts with desire first. That's the temptation. That's the sin looking attractive. But notice that desire still needs to give birth to sin.

The truth is that there will be hundreds of ways every day that you will be tempted. But those temptations are not yet sin until you act upon it. Now, for many of us, this is actually a huge relief. Because I know many people that are wracked by feelings of guilt before they have even indulged. This is why I believe personally that if a person wrestles with, you know, the sin of our age with same-sex attraction, but doesn't engage in homosexual practice, I don't yet understand how that is a sin.

Entertaining lustful thoughts, however, is another story, of course. But perhaps there are Christians who wrestle with the idea that they may be tempted, and yet they may never give in, but feel that they are sinning just because they have a weakness in that area. That can have lots of further discussions, I think. But the point is temptation is not the same as sinning. Desire, when it has conceived, desire, when it has become pregnant, becomes pregnant with the entertaining of our hearts, with the feeding of it in our minds, desire that becomes pregnant with the time and with the energy we give it, eventually gives birth to full-blown sin.

This is the point at which we break God's law. This is the point where we depart from God's will. But even at this point, we don't yet realise what we've done. We don't yet realise its full effect, and oftentimes we don't realise that we have given birth to sin until this final phase pops up, and this is where our cycle sort of finishes. James writes, when sin is fully grown, it brings forth death.

Now, this death isn't simply physical death. Scripture tells us, and we know from experience, that when we sin, we don't immediately die. So that's not obviously what is being talked about here. We don't die the instant we gossip, the instant we slander, the instant we hate. In fact, we know that when Adam and Eve plunged humanity into sin by disobeying God, God tells them that they will now taste death, and yes, instead of living forever, their lives are limited by death, by a physical death.

But what happens at this point is another type of death, another type of dying that is actually far more heartbreaking. It's what the New Testament calls the second death, and it identifies that death as hell, the eternal separation from God and from life, the life that He offers. And I think that is the death that is being talked about here. It's an eternal death. It is a dying that is tied to God's full and final judgement on sin.

The moment where God's gracious and patient waiting ends, and where He judges once and for all the actions of every single person who has ever existed. And yet, Romans one and two also tells us that the deathly effects of sin, the deadly effects of sin won't simply be realised in the then, but it is also felt and experienced in the here and the now. That even before judgement day, the early effect of God's wrath is experienced when He allows people to experience the horrible consequences of rebellion. In other words, sin in its own nature produces death. Sin destroys.

Satan himself, a slave to sin. He's not the origin of sin. He is a slave to its effect himself. Satan is said by Jesus to be the one who steals, kills, and destroys. At certain moments, God removes His protective hand from the consequences of that brokenness in the here and the now.

And Romans one twenty-four says He hands us, He hands people over to the lusts of their heart. That is His wrath, that is His punishment, that is the consequence of sin being felt even now. If a pastor could have a dollar for every person who sat in their offices, head in hand saying, I don't know what came over me. I don't know how I could have done what I did. I've destroyed my life.

I've destroyed my kids' lives. I've destroyed my marriage. I've destroyed my career. This is the death that is being spoken of here. That's what James so urgently calls Christians to avoid. Unresisted desire gives birth to temptation.

We willingly then step into temptation, and temptation gives birth to sin. And then apart from God's grace, only destruction remains. Only destruction remains apart from His grace. That is why James' warning is so blunt: don't be deceived, don't buy the lie. Sin comes from deception.

The deception of our self-talk and our rationalisation, it comes when we listen to the statements we tell ourselves, things like, it's only this once. No one needs to know about this. Is it really that bad? These are the lies that are seeking to undermine and erode the will of God. Deceptions that distort God's crystal clear will and make it something grey and cloudy that we can just put aside.

James warns us, when sin is fully grown in us by our acting upon it, it produces death. So when we gossip, when we cheat, when we hate, when we harbour greed, when we are sexually impure, when we get drunk, when we dishonour our father, our mother, those authorities over us, when we blaspheme God's name, you and I, even as Christians, may taste something of this death, perhaps not eternal death. Thankfully, as Christians, not eternal death. But even as people who straddle earth and heaven, the destructive consequences of sin may still be experienced in the here and the now. So what hope is there for any of us to resist this incredible power?

We say to the apostle James, it's one thing to tell us resist temptation. It's one thing for Paul to say, do not allow Satan a foothold. It's one thing to pray, lead us not into temptation, but how do we actively set ourselves up to become stronger against sin that tempts us? And this is our third and our final point. Sin is only conquered by a greater love.

Why does James so clearly define this nature, this cycle of temptation? Well, it's not because he wants to burden Christians with guilt. He doesn't just end there and say, well, good luck. He wants to teach us to learn how to overcome. And so there's hope, even as we listen to these words, and we may feel decidedly uncomfortable, and we may think back on our week, we may think back on our evening last night, even our morning this morning, and feel burdened.

I wanna tell you, take heart, because God's word here is actually going to help us. That is God's purpose. Did you wonder with me, when we read this passage, why James moves from talking about temptation in verses 12 to 16, and then says in verse 17, almost randomly, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Doesn't that feel like a sudden change? Well, it actually makes perfect sense and gives us the secret to success in resisting sin.

The Bible says, here is the strongest bastion that will help you to resist, and that is the absolutely firm conviction that God is good. That God is good always. That He works everything in our lives together for good. That He wants good for my life. It's the greatest truth that you and I must believe in order to conquer sin.

Otherwise, we will fall for the same thing that Eve fell for in the Garden of Eden, when Satan said to Eve, did God really say? And does God really want you to be safe? Or does God want you to remain ignorant? Is God jealous for His own power? If you eat this fruit, you will become like Him.

That's what the temptation in the Garden of Eden is actually all about. It wasn't that Satan was denying the truth or the authority of God's word. Satan was denying the truth about God Himself. Is God really good? And so if we haven't come to believe and know that God is really good, we have no defence against temptation. James is saying, brothers and sisters, those enticements of the hearts are never better for you.

God is always better, because every good and perfect gift comes down to you from a God who is absolutely changeless in His goodness. Friends, this is the strongest weapon against falling into temptation. It is to be able to say to yourself, God wants better for me than this. God has said no to these things because He's not tempted. He resists that temptation.

He said no to this, and because God is good, and because I trust Him, I will also say no to this. As you gaze upon the Father of lights, in whom there is no change like the shifting shadows, as you gaze into the face of the never-changing glorious goodness of our God despite our weakness, despite our changeability, as we look to Him and say, Father, Father, You know this is causing me to desire. And You know the temptation to enter into this is tearing me apart, but Father, You are good. You are good. The most powerful weapon to push back against sin in your life is to believe that God is good and that He is the giver of good things.

Now, this morning, many of us will say amen to this statement. Of course, we believe that. Many of us will resolve ourselves to resist those things that we know we are weak against. But later this week, or next week, or the week after, you may think to yourself, KJ, how can I really be sure of this? KJ, when my boyfriend holds my entire world in his hands, and he threatens to leave me if I don't give in to him, if all my colleagues undermine my boss and systematically drag me into their schemes as well, when I feel the desire to bully a kid at school for a reason I'm not even sure about, when the past hurts of my life tempts me to bitterness and unforgiveness.

KJ, how can I take my eyes off those things and trust that God holds a better plan for me? How can my sin truly be conquered by a greater love? Well, it's only possible because of one reality. And it's something that happened in a moment that was irrespective of all our temptations, of all our weaknesses, indeed, of all our stumbles into sin. And it is being implied here in the final verse, verse 18. James writes, of God's own will, He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures.

How do we truly conquer sin? How can we resist temptation day in and day out? It is to remember not what we must do, but what has been done. To conquer sin is to become assured of the knowledge that you've become a child of God, not by what you have done or been able to do, but because of a sovereign, independent work of grace that has caused you to become alive, to trust a message, a word of truth that now has produced new life in you. There's this beautiful interplay of words here in this passage.

It says, desire gives birth. Desire conceives sin. And in verse 18, we are told that God has brought forth life. He has brought us forth. Those are words of giving birth, of causing to come into being.

The word of truth is the gospel of Jesus Christ. His death on the cross for our sin, His resurrection three days later for our eternal life. And this is the truth that sets us free. It gives life. The result is that we become something like the first fruits of a farmer's harvest.

In other words, even as sin's destructive consequences can also be experienced in the here and the now, even amongst Christians, there is also the hope of new sprouts in us. Little buds of life, the first fruits of the season, offers us proof that a far greater future awaits, a life that is completely free from sin. When you are tempted, look at the other moments of victory in your life, and you will realise that the first fruits of a greater future is seen in the fact that you, a little Christian, have been able to resist at some point. That you, a little Christian, grieve and mourn and feel guilty about sin. There is already first fruits in you.

This is the first fruit of eternal life, that you can say to sin, you no longer reign in me. You shall not drive me to despair because I am a new creation in Jesus Christ. So here's the powerful truth in how we resist. Firstly, to take responsibility for our own sin. It is me and my heart.

We don't look to our left, we don't look to our right. Secondly, to identify that there is a cycle of temptation and sin, and that we have to be proactive in monitoring that cycle. We have to see it for what it is. And therefore, once we know it, we can break it. But thirdly, we find the strength to break that cycle by trusting in God's goodness shown in Jesus Christ.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you that this morning we may hear a compelling, motivating word that calls us back to the centre of it all, the meat and the three veg of our Christian life, which is to slay sin in our lives as we look forward to the new kingdom arriving. To fight back against the temptation to disobey what You have clearly told us, to take responsibility for my life first. Father, help us to do that. Help us to do it with vigour, with passion, with intent, with clear and sober thinking, with plans and resolutions.

No longer do we wanna fall back into these cycles that are ultimately destructive, that are ultimately pointless, and we have tasted that. We know that. Help us, oh God, to resist. We commit ourselves to resist. And Lord Jesus, thank you that the Holy Spirit has promised to us, the one that will lead us into all truth, the one who will fight the temptation in us, the one that will remind us of the holiness of God, the one that will help us to put aside irreverent and silly myths, but rather to be trained in godliness.

Thank you that we have a greater love. Thank you that we can hear again this morning that You want what is good for us, what is best for us. Oh, God, when we are tempted, help us to believe and remember that. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.