This week on the podcast, we are answering a crucial question: Are our temptations sinful? Is it sinful to be tempted? This is a crucial question for us to answer on the podcast because there is really a debate raging in larger evangelicalism about whether that’s the case or not, particularly as it relates to the issue of homosexuality. The debate is, is it wrong merely to commit homosexual acts, or to be tempted to commit homosexual acts? The reason this is so important is because there are some people who want to argue for a homosexual orientation that want to put this orientation in the category of “temptation” and say that the presence of a homosexual desire is not a sin, but is a temptation. Since it’s a temptation, it’s not a sin and therefore not wrong.
Another reason why this is such a crucial question for us to answer does not have anything to do with what’s raging out there in an evangelical debate, but with what’s raging in our own hearts. I have talked with I don’t even know how many people just in the last week in the context of doing my ministry that are wondering about what’s going on in their own lives when they are tempted by something. It could be homosexuality, it could be general sexual desire, or it could be anything else. They wonder, “When I am tempted, do I need to repent?” So this is an issue that has implications for the larger conversations that evangelicals are having, and it’s a conversation that has an impact on the lives we’re living as we walk before the face of God. So we want to talk about whether it is a sin to be tempted.
To answer the question, I want to look at Hebrews 4:15. There, the Bible says that “we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who’s been tempted in all things as we are yet without sin.” Now, this text reminds us to have a level of sophistication here in our thinking, and it tells us that there is some temptation that is sinful and some temptation that is not sinful. The Bible is very clear that Jesus was tempted in all ways as we are, and yet he did it without sins. So Hebrews 4:15 makes it clear that there are some temptations that you can have that will not be sinful. The reason we know that is because that was the experience of Jesus Christ.
So the question is, how can we tell whether a temptation is sinful or whether a temptation is not sinful as in the experience of Jesus. I would encourage us to compare Hebrews 4:15 with James 1:14-15. It says each one is tempted when he’s carried away and enticed by his own lust or his own desire, and then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. So here, James, the brother of Jesus, is talking about a kind of lust, a kind of desire, that is bad. It terminates in sin and death, and what he says is that kind of temptation is linked with desire.
To really understand this in its fullest sense, we need to talk about then two kinds of temptation. There is external temptation and there is internal temptation. External temptation is the kind of temptation that is outside of us, so we could say that if an immodest woman walked by a man or if an immodest man walked by a woman, there is a certain external kind of temptation. There is the opportunity to be led astray by this thing outside of you, you know, if you walk into an office and there is a million dollars in cash sitting on the table. That is an external temptation; that is, there is an opportunity outside of you that is presenting you with the availability of sin. So there is the external kind of temptation.
This is the kind of temptation that Jesus Christ would have experienced in his life on earth. There was the devil saying, “Hey, why don’t you take this stone and turn it into bread? I mean, you are hungry after all. Here, why don’t you throw yourself down from this building? God’s gonna have your back. I mean, come on.” So there is this external presentation of an opportunity to sin.
But then there is an internal temptation. There is the heart that is greedy, the heart that desires, and once those external realities latches onto them, or to use the language of James 1, hooks onto those external realities, our sinful hearts are characterized by sinful desire. And that is full of hooks that latch onto the external temptations. Jesus was tempted in every way we are in the external sense, but he did it without sinning because his heart was not sinful, and so had no hooks to cling onto the external presentations for sin. So we can say that temptation does not have to be sinful in the external sense, but temptation will be sinful when it is matched with an internal desire to sin. It is the corruption of a fallen human heart, therefore, that internalizes temptation, and internalized temptation matched with a desire to sin will constitute a sinful temptation.
When you think about this internal desire now, you don’t even need an external temptation. A person who is internally tempted to sin doesn’t need the immodest woman or the immodest man to walk by, they can conjure up that sinful image in their mind. Even in the absence of an external temptation, there is an internal temptation that is itself sinful.
The question is, is it a sin to be tempted? The answer is, it depends if you have an external temptation that presents itself to you and you immediately flee to Jesus Christ. You have a heart that does not hook onto that temptation in any way. Then you were really and meaningfully tempted in the same way that Jesus was in Matthew 4, for example, but it was not a sin. It did not latch onto any hook in your heart. On the other hand, as soon as we begin to desire things that are not good, then we would have to say in that sense, the temptation has become internal. It’s met with a desire in our heart that hooks onto something that’s either outside of us or purely internal in our minds, and we have sinned.
The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is, whether there is external temptation or whether there is internal temptation, Jesus Christ gives us His grace to escape it. He pays for it when we sin with our temptation, and in His resurrection power, He gives us the ability to turn away from temptation and to live a life that is holy and pleasing to Him.