If you’ve been a believer for any amount of time, you’ve noticed that we still sin, even though we don’t want to. At times, it can feel like there’s nothing you can do, that no matter what you do you’ll just keep committing the same old sins until you die, no matter how hard you pray. You’ve probably wished that the temptations would just go away, only for that to not happen. Good news; there are strategies you can use to gain the upper hand in your war against indwelling sin. One of the most basic, yet often overlooked, strategies is taking away opportunities to be tempted to sin in the first place.
Your surroundings can make it easier or harder to resist temptation, by reducing or increasing opportunities to succumb to temptation. For example, a believer who is tempted to get drunk will have a much easier time resisting the temptation if he has no alcohol in the house than he would if he had a fully stocked liquor cabinet. If alcohol is not readily available he would have to go to a store and buy it before he can give in to the temptation, instead of simply going to the fridge and grabbing a beer after a long day, only to find that he can’t stop until he’s completely wasted. The fact that getting drunk requires much more effort means that the indwelling sin has to overcome much more resistance to get him to succumb. It’s going to take more than a quick trip to the kitchen to trick him into falling. Instead, he would have to get in the car, go to the store, buy liquor, and bring it home. At any point in this chain of events he can reverse course, giving him many more opportunities to successfully resist temptation. Obviously, he would still have to be on guard and fight against the temptation, but it’s the difference between a defense-in-depth with multiple fortified fallback positions, and a desperate last stand.
Taking away opportunities for temptation sounds easy at first, but it gets much more difficult in practice, since it requires changes to the lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to which can be a very difficult and uncomfortable process. This is what Jesus was alluding to in Matthew 5:27-30, where He said to pluck out an eye or cut off a hand that was causing you to sin. He very obviously wasn’t endorsing literal bodily mutilation; your eyes and hands don’t make decisions for you, your mind does that. He was using hyperbole to get across how seriously we should take removing sources of temptation, in the case of His example, the temptation to lust. A porn addict may feel like he’s popping out an eyeball when he gets rid of his smartphone, and a woman who loves to be lusted after may feel like she’s cutting off a hand when she deletes her Instagram. Both are removing avenues of temptation, even though it is painful to do in the moment and may seem to outsiders like overkill.
It shouldn’t be surprising when we feel great internal resistance to these changes. The flesh, our old sinful nature, doesn’t like to have its avenues of sin taken away. It will, in some cases, feel almost as hard as cutting off a hand or plucking out an eye to change your pattern of life or your surroundings to avoid temptation, but this is actually a good sign. The places where your flesh fights you the hardest are the places most in need of sanctification, the strongholds that it uses to launch its strongest temptations against you. Just like in physical warfare, leaving the enemy in possession of fortified positions only allows it to regroup unmolested after a defeat and attack again when you least expect it. No one who does this can expect to have much success in war, physical or spiritual.
A believer who fights against drunkenness, to go back to our previous example, would be a fool to keep alcohol in the house or go to bars and just pray that he won’t be tempted. This would be like a general leaving his enemy in possession of a fortress right in the middle of his own lines instead of taking the fortress and using it himself. Not only will his lines be broken, but it will be his own fault.
Do we really expect God to deliver us from temptation if we court it at every opportunity? Do we even want him to, if we’re knowingly opening ourselves to temptation?
You are under no obligation to give sin a fair chance, just the opposite, we are commanded to make no provision for the lusts of our flesh (Romans 13:14). You will be tempted, but you have a say in whether the temptation finds you relaxed and unprepared or dug in and ready to do battle.
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