Temptation

Tonight I taught the lesson for youth meeting, a lesson from Genesis 2-3 about the strategies Satan used to tempt Eve into sin and how we experience those same things.

Before the meeting started, I had a bowl of chocolates sitting in the front of the room with a sign next to it saying, "Do not eat!" (in Romanian, of course :) ). I didn't ask him too, but our pastor did a great job of ignoring the sign and eating some of my candy (which the kids just basically ignored for one reason or another). I'm glad he did, because the illustration wouldn't have worked as well if everyone just ignored the temptation. Because life doesn't generally work that way...we aren't very good at just ignoring temptations that are sitting there calling out to us.

When I asked the kids why they didn't eat the candy, their answers were pretty simple. "The sign said not to." "I wasn't allowed to." (Even though I basically left the stuff there unattended and even left the room for a few minutes.) "I knew I couldn't have it, so I stayed away from it." Truthfully, I wish my response to temptation were always so clear cut and easy..."I know it's wrong, so I'm not going to do it. Period."

Instead, I too often seem to be like our pastor (who really ate the candy just for the sake of the illustraton...or so he says!). "No one was watching." "What would happen if I got caught? It's not like there would be consequences." "It was sitting there, no one was watching, and I just kept looking at it, getting closer to it, until I couldn't ignore it anymore." It took a while, but eventually at least some of the kids began to understand that they use these same excuses for sin in their lives.

For example, cheating is rampant in this society. In fact, it's pretty much expected...by the teachers as much as by the students. Teachers allow (and sometimes encourage) cheating because good test scores make the teachers themselves look better. Even Christian kids rarely think of cheating as wrong. So we talked about how Satan lies to us, just as he did to Eve, making us believe that it something really isn't wrong even though God has forbidden it. And we looked at Scriptural principles regarding cheating (accurately translated as "stealing" in Romanian).

I love it when a lesson that I am asked to teach has a very strong, very practical lesson for the kids. Even though that lesson may not be easy to hear (or easy to put into practice). I love knowing that they can see how Scripture applies to their everyday life rather than just being a bunch of ideas and theories. Tonight was one of those nights!